great city,
they were a race not then in existence. He had to fight his battle with
poverty alone and without friends, and he did fight it bravely. He was
his own clerk, reporter, editor, and errand boy. He wrote all the
articles that appeared in "The Herald," and many of the advertisements,
and did all the work that was to be performed about his humble office.

"The Herald" was a small sheet of four pages of four columns each.
Nearly every line of it was fresh news. Quotations from other papers
were scarce. Originality was then, as now, the motto of the
establishment. Small as it was, the paper was attractive. The story that
its first numbers were scurrilous and indecent is not true, as a
reference to the old files of the journal will prove. They were of a
character similar to that of "The Herald" of to-day, and were marked by
the same industry, tact, and freshness, which make the paper to-day the
most salable in the land.

Says Mr. Parton: "The first numbers were filled with nonsense and gossip
about the city of New York, to which his poverty confined him. He had no
boat with which to board arriving ships, no share in the pony express
from Washington, and no correspondents in other cities. All he could do
was to catch the floating gossip, scandal, and folly of the town, and
present as much of them every day as one man could get upon paper by
sixteen hours' labor. He laughed at every thing and every body,--not
excepting himself and his squint eye,--and though his jokes were not
always good, they were generally good enough. People laughed, and were
willing to expend a cent the next day to see what new folly the man
would commit or relate. We all like to read about our own neighborhood;
this paper gratified the propensity.

"The man, we repeat, had really a vein of poetry in him, and the first
numbers of 'The Herald' show it. He had occasion one day to mention that
Broadway was about to be paved with wooden blocks. This was not a very
promising subject for a poetical comment, but he added: 'When this is
done, every vehicle will have to wear sleigh-bells, as in sleighing
times, and Broadway will be so quiet that you can pay a compliment to a
lady, in passing, and she will hear you.' This was nothing in itself;
but here was a man wrestling with fate in a cellar, who could turn you
out two hundred such paragraphs a week, the year round. Men can growl in
a cellar; this man could laugh, and keep laughing, and make the floa