orces and opened an office for the publication of
the _New York Mirror_ at 163 William Street. Morris was a young man
then, but already gave strong evidence of the decided character he was
to develop as an eminently practical printer and successful writer of
songs--a man of such unusual personal magnetism that well-nigh every
man who walked towards him a stranger walked away from him a friend.
The eight years which followed the starting of the _New York Mirror_
saw many changes; saw Morris becoming more and more popular as a
writer of songs; saw him publishing the memorable _Woodman, Spare
that Tree_, that was to make his name known over the land; saw
Woodworth withdraw from the _Mirror_, and that publication
strengthened and starting anew when Morris drew to the enterprise
Theodore S. Fay and Nathaniel P. Willis; saw Fay going abroad in a few
years as Secretary of Legation at Berlin, in which city he was to live
out most of his life.

N.P. Willis was a young man, too, in those early days of his
association with Morris. He had given up the _American Monthly
Magazine_ at Boston to devote his energies to the _New York Mirror_.
In the year that he became associated with Morris, 1831, he went
abroad at a salary of ten dollars a week, hoping to add strength and
diversity to the paper by a series of letters. In London, poor and
struggling, he managed to introduce himself into the fashionable set
at that time presided over by Lady Blessington, and he came to be the
adoration of all the sentimental young ladies in that set. There was a
daintiness about his dress, a suggestion of foppishness in the
arrangement of his blond hair, trifles about him which suggested the
dandy and the idler; but withal there was a terrific capacity for work
under the smooth outside. His letters to the _Mirror_ and other papers
did much for the refinement of literature and art, and, indirectly,
for the manners of the times. He was in America again in 1836,
bringing with him an English lady as a bride,--the Mary for whom the
country place Glen Mary at Owego was named, where he wrote his
delightful _Letters from under a Bridge_. He was again in Europe in
1839, soon starting _The Corsair_, and back to America in 1844, to
join his friend Morris (the _Mirror_ by this time being defunct) in
the starting of a daily paper which took the name of the _Evening
Mirror_. From this on Willis lived an active social-literary life,
singing of Broadway with the same f