His education as a journalist was completed by the failure of his Philadelphia scheme.  Returning to New York, he resolved to attempt no more to rise by party aid, but henceforth have no master but the public.  On the 6th of May, 1835, appeared the first number of the Morning Herald, price one cent.  It was born in a cellar in Wall Street,—­not a basement, but a veritable cellar.  Some persons are still doing business in that region who remember going down into its subterranean office, and buying copies of the new paper from its editor, who used to sit at a desk composed of two flour-barrels and a piece of board, and who occupied the only chair in the establishment.  For a considerable time his office contained absolutely nothing but his flour-barrel desk, one wooden chair, and a pile of Heralds.  “I remember,” writes Mr. William Gowans, the well-known bookseller of Nassau Street,

“to have entered the subterranean office of its editor early in its career, and purchased a single copy of the paper, for which I paid the sum of one cent United States currency.  On this occasion the proprietor, editor, and vendor was seated at his desk, busily engaged writing, and appeared to pay little or no attention to me as I entered.  On making known my object in coming in, he requested me to put my money down on the counter, and help myself to a paper; all this time he continuing his writing operations.  The office was a single oblong underground room; its furniture consisted of a counter, which also served as a desk, constructed from two flour-barrels, perhaps empty, standing apart from each other about four feet, with a single plank covering both; a chair, placed in the centre, upon which sat the editor busy at his vocation, with an inkstand by his right hand; on the end nearest the door were placed the papers for sale.”

Everything appeared to be against his success.  It was one poor man in a cellar against the world.  Already he had failed three times; first, in 1825, when he attempted to establish a Sunday paper; next, in 1832, when he tried a party journal; recently, in Philadelphia.  With great difficulty, and after many rebuffs, he had prevailed upon two young printers to print his paper and share its profits or losses, and he possessed about enough money to start the enterprise and sustain it ten days.  The cheapness of his paper was no longer a novelty, for there was already a penny paper with a paying circulation.  He had cut loose from all party ties, and he had no influential friends except those who had an interest in his failure.  The great public, to which he made this last desperate appeal, knew him not even by name.  The newsboy system scarcely existed; and all that curious machinery by which, in these days, a “new candidate for public favor” is placed, at no expense, on a thousand news-stands, had not been thought of.  There he was alone in his cellar, without clerk, errand-boy, or assistant of any kind.  For many weeks he did