Your Wife.
This is the letter in which David Elliot thinks his wife "went too far." He produced it before Judge David Matchett Saturday in a suit for divorce.
118. Suspense Lead.—The most difficult to handle of all the informal leads is the suspense lead, where the writer purposely begins with unimportant but enticing details and lures the reader on from paragraph to paragraph, always holding out a half-promise of something worth while if one will continue a bit further. In this way the reader is tempted to the middle or end of the story before he is told the real point of the article. A difficult type of lead, this, but forceful when well handled.
Pierre L. Corbin, 60 years old, of Eatontown, who runs a dairy and drives his own milk wagon, matched the speed of his horse against that of a New Jersey Central train yesterday morning at 7 o'clock in a race to the crossing at Eatontown. It was a tie. Both got there at the same time.[15]
[15] New York Times, August 27, 1915.
There are two ways of patching a pair of trousers,—neatly and bluey; and probably no tailor in Manhattan is as certain of it to-day as Sigmund Steinbern. So he stated to the police yesterday when a customer sat him down on his lighted gas stove, and so he insisted last night when friends called to see him at the Washington Heights Hospital. Furthermore, to say nothing of moreover, he is a tailor of standing, or will be for the next couple of weeks, and he knows his place. It is not, he feels, upon a gas stove.
To friends who called at the hospital to ask Mr. Steinbern exactly what had happened to him, he said, by way of changing the subject, that he has a sign in his store upon which the following appears:
Everything Done in a Hurry
There, he contends, lies the seed of the trouble. Regarding the seat of the trouble, more anon....[16]
[16] New York Herald, December 21, 1915.