"The Sunny Hour—A Monthly Magazine for Boys and Girls. Published and Edited by Tello d'Apery, a Boy twelve years old."
This was the inscription which appeared on the title-page of a new periodical which made its appearance in New York a few years ago. Editors of important daily and weekly newspapers, finding the pretty brown-covered magazine on their desks along with more ambitious-looking first numbers of other periodicals, stopped in the midst of their work to glance over the result of a twelve-year-old editor's work. Accustomed as they were to reading and hearing of prodigies in America, the land of prodigies, they were yet surprised at the enterprise, not to say the audacity, of the young boy who essayed to put himself before the public as the editor and proprietor of a magazine.
"The commercial instincts of the American nation show themselves in its very infants!" they reflected amusedly. "A few years hence that twelve-year-old, grown to be a man, is likely to make Wall Street hum."
Commercial instincts! Well, yes, perhaps, but of an order more likely to bring about results in the neighbourhood of Baxter Street and the other poverty-stricken haunts of the lowly East Side than among the brown-stone business palaces of Wall Street.
Turning to the first "leader" written by the young editor on his editorial page, the literary critics were told in childish language why so small a specimen of humanity had dared to venture into the world of letters.
"I am twelve years old," ran the leading article, "so I hope all the public will excuse any mistakes I make in my paper. I am publishing it to earn money to buy new boots and shoes and get old ones mended for poor boys and girls in New York who have to go barefooted. That's what I'm going to do with all the profits. I want to make enough money to rent a house where I can have my offices and lots of room for a Barefoot Mission, where the boys and girls in New York can come and get boots for nothing. I hope the public will buy my paper, which is a dollar a year and ten cents for single copies."
How to Manage Fathers and Mothers.
BY THE EDITOR.
I have had a father and mother twelve years, and I am said to manage them pretty well, and I am going to tell all boys and girls just how I do it, and it would do no harm for them to try the same plan and see how it works in their cases.
FACSIMILE OF AN EXTRACT FROM NO. 1
OF "THE SUNNY HOUR."
So it happened that when the important editors of New York and other large cities read the leading article in the first copy of The Sunny Hour, there was a kindness and gentleness in their tones as they threw the little periodical over to the "exchange editors," saying, "Here, this little thing isn't a bad idea at all! Be sure you notice it in your reviews."
I doubt if any other new paper ever published received from its contemporaries such kind and encouraging "press notices" as did The Sunny Hour, and when it appeared upon the stalls for sale the newsdealers sold a great many copies.
