ployed as a
parlor maid in the residence of Mr. Spudd Bung, a well-known clubman
forty-two inches around the chest, was arrested yesterday by the flying
squad of the emergency police after having, so it is alleged, put four
ounces of alleged picrate of potash into the alleged coffee of her
employer's family's alleged breakfast at their residence on Hudson
Heights in the most fashionable quarter of 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:

SUBURBAN ITEM

"Yesterday at the police court of Surbiton-on-Thames Mary Forrester, a
servant in the employ of Mr. S. Bung was taken into custody on a charge
of having put a noxious preparation, possibly poison, into the coffee of
her employer's family. The young woman was remanded for a week."

Look at that. Mary Forrester a servant?

How wide was she round the chest? It doesn't say. Mr. S