Another of my "cubs" was Henry Armstrong, whose abilities have since won for him a place on the brilliant editorial writing staff of the _Sun_. Still another was Henry Wright, who is now editor-in-chief of the paper on which he "learned his trade,"--though the paper has since changed its name to the _Globe_. Another was Nelson Hirsh, who afterwards became editor of the _Sunday World_.
On my editorial staff were Henry R. Elliot--dead now,--James Davis, who carried every detail of a singularly varied scholarship at his finger-tips, ready for instant use, and whose grace as a writer, illuminated as it was by an exquisitely subtle humor, ought to have made him famous, and would have done so, if death had not come to him too soon.
Doubtless there were others whom I ought to mention here in grateful remembrance, but the incessant activities of the score and more of years that have elapsed since my association with them ended have obliterated many details from my memory. Let me say that to all of them I render thanks for loyal and highly intelligent assistance in the difficult task I then had to wrestle with.
With a staff like that we were able to get the news and print it, and we did both in a way that attracted attention in other newspaper offices as well as among newspaper readers. With such writers as those mentioned and others, the editorial utterances of the paper attracted an attention that had never before been accorded to them.
So far as its books of account gave indication, the _Commercial Advertiser_ had never earned or paid a dividend. At the end of the first year under this new régime it paid a dividend of fifty per cent. At the end of its second year it paid its stockholders one hundred per cent. The earnings of the third year were wisely expended in the purchase of new presses and machinery. Before the end of the fourth year I had resigned its editorship to become an editorial writer on _The World_.
I intensely enjoyed the work of "making bricks without straw" on the _Commercial Advertiser_--by which I mean that with a staff of one man to ten on the great morning newspapers, and with one dollar to expend where they could squander hundreds, we managed not only to keep step but to lead them in such news-getting enterprises as those incident to the prosecution of the boodle Aldermen and Jake Sharp, the Diss de Barr case, and the other exciting news problems of the time.