the metropolis. Dr. Slink, the leading fashionable practitioner of
the neighbourhood who was immediately summoned said that but for his
own extraordinary dexterity and promptness the death of the whole
family, if not of the entire entourage, was a certainty. The
magistrate in committing Miss De Forrest for trial took occasion to
enlarge upon her youth and attractive appearance: he castigated the
moving pictures severely and said that he held them together with the
public school system and the present method of doing the hair,
directly responsible for the crimes of the kind alleged."

Now when you read this over you begin to feel that something big has
happened. Here is a man like Dr. Slink, all quivering with promptness
and dexterity. Here is an inserted picture, a photograph, a brick
house in a row marked with a cross (+) and labelled "The Bung
Residence as. it appeared immediately after the alleged outrage." It
isn't really. It is just a photograph that we use for this sort of
thing and have grown to like. It is called sometimes:--"Residence of
Senator Borah" or "Scene of the Recent Spiritualistic Manifestations"
or anything of the sort. As long as it is marked with a cross (+) the
reader will look at it with interest.

In other words we make something out of an occurrence like this.
It doesn't matter if it all fades out afterwards when it appears
that Mary De Forrest merely put ground allspice into the coffee in
mistake for powdered sugar and that the family didn't drink it
anyway. The reader has already turned to other mysteries.

But contrast the pitifully tame way in which the same event is
written up in England. Here it is: