"Will the Baptist church continue to maintain an attitude of timidity when John D. Rockefeller of Standard Oil is mentioned?" asked the Rev. R. A. Bateman, from East Jaffrey, N. H., of the ministers assembled in Ford Hall last evening at the New England Baptist conference.—Boston Herald.
The opening quotation may sometimes be made an excuse for a brief description of the speaker or his gestures as in the following. This is good at times but it may easily be overworked or become "yellow" in tone.
"There is no fire escape," remarked Gypsy Smith, the famous English evangelist, yesterday before the fashionable audience of the Fifth Avenue Baptist Church. He held aloft a Bible as he made this declaration during an eloquent sermon on the possibility of losing faith and wandering from the narrow way.—New York World.
2. Direct Quotation Beginning.—Paragraph.—You notice that in each of the foregoing the quoted sentence is incorporated grammatically into the first sentence of the lead. It is followed by a comma and the words "said Mr. ——," "was the statement of ——," "declared Mr. ——," etc. This construction is possible only when the quoted sentence is short and simple. When it is long or complex, it is well to paragraph it separately and to put the explanations in a separate paragraph, thus:
"If the United States had possessed in 1898 a single dirigible balloon, even of the size of the one now at Fort Myer, Virginia, which cost less than $10,000, the American army and navy would not have long remained in doubt of the presence of Cervera's fleet in Santiago harbor."
This statement was made today by Major G. O. Squier, assistant chief signal officer of the army, in an address on aëronautics delivered before the American Society of Mechanical Engineers at 29 West Thirty-ninth street.—New York Mail.
This same construction must always be used when the statement quoted in the lead consists of more than one sentence, as in the following:
"The climate of Wisconsin is as good for recovery from tuberculosis as that of any state in the union. It is not the climate, but the out-of-doors air that works the cure."
So said Harvey Dee Brown in his tuberculosis crusade lecture in Kilbourn park last night.—Milwaukee Free Press.
It is to be noted that the statement quoted in the lead is never split into two parts, separated by explanation. The quotation is always gathered together at the beginning and followed by the explanation.