Читать книгу The Story of the Sun: New York, 1833-1918 онлайн

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But to return to our meal. Said Mr. Locke’s New Era:

A paragraph is going the rounds of the papers abusing the Astor House. Nothing can be more groundless. Where the arrangements are complete, the charges, of course, must be corresponding. We suppose the report has been set afloat by some person who was kicked out for not paying his bill.

To this horrid insinuation Day replied:

The report they speak of was set afloat by ourselves, after paying $1.25 for a breakfast for a lady and her infant a year and a half old, served just one hour and seven minutes after it was ordered, with coffee black as ink and without milk, and that, too, in a room so uncleanly as to be rather offensive.

Locke wanted to make the New Era another Sun, but he failed. His second hoax, “The Lost Manuscript of Mungo Park,” which purported to tell hitherto unrelated adventures of the Scottish explorer, fell down. The public knew that the New Era was edited by the author of the moon story. When the New Era died, Locke went to the Brooklyn Eagle, just founded, and he succeeded Henry C. Murphy, the proprietor and first editor, when that famous lawyer and writer was running for mayor of Brooklyn. Locke afterward was a custom-house employee. He died on Staten Island in 1871.