cident."

"What is it?" thinks the reader. "The hotel itself, which is an
old Georgian structure dating probably from about 1750, is a quiet
establishment, its clientele mainly drawn from business men in the
cattle-droving and distillery business from South Wales."

"What happened?" thinks the reader.

"Its cuisine has long been famous for the excellence of its boiled
shrimps."

"What happened?"

"While the hotel itself is also known as the meeting place of the
Surbiton Harmonic Society and other associations."

"What happened?"

"Among the more prominent of the guests of the hotel has been numbered
during the present Parliamentary session Mr. Llewylln Ap. Jones, M.P.,
for South Llanfydd. Mr. Jones apparently came to his room last night
at about ten P.M., and put on his carpet slippers and his blue dressing
gown. He then seems to have gone to the cupboard and taken from it a
whisky bottle which however proved to be empty. The unhappy gentleman
then apparently went to bed..."

At that point the American reader probably stops reading, thinking that
he has heard it all. The unhappy man found that the bottle was empty
and went to bed: very natural: and the affair very properly called a
"distressing incident": quite right. But the trained English reader
would know that there was more to come and that the air of quiet was
only assumed, and he would read on and on until at last the tragic
interest heightened, the four shots were fired, with a good long pause
after each for discussion of the path of the bullet through Mr. Ap.
Jones.

I am not saying that either the American way or the British way is the
better. They are just two different ways, that's all. But the result is
that anybody from the United States or Canada reading the English papers
gets the impression that nothing is happening: and an English reader
of our newspapers with us gets the idea that the whole place is in a
tumult.

When I was in London I used always, in glancing at the morning papers,
to get a first impression that the whole world was almost asleep. There
was, for example, a heading called INDIAN INTELLIGENCE that showed,
on close examination, that two thousand Parsees had died of the blue
plague, that a powder boat had blown up at Bombay, that some one had
thrown a couple of bombs at one of the provincial governors, and that
four thousand agitators had been sentenced to twenty years hard labour
each. But the whole thing was just called "I