Mary Jane So-and-So was yesterday charged before the magistrate with stealing a pair of diamond earrings from her mistress. It appears [always it appears, that is the formula] that, last Monday, as Mrs. X. went to her room to dress for dinner, she missed a pair of diamond earrings, which she usually kept in a little drawer in her bedroom. On questioning her maid on the subject, she received incoherent answers. Suspicion that the maid was the thief arose in her mind, and——
A long paragraph in this dry style will be published in the Times, or any other London morning paper.
Now, the American reporter will be required to bring something a little more entertaining if he hopes to be worth his salt on the staff of his paper, and he will probably get up an account of the case somewhat in the following fashion:
Mary Jane So-and-so is a pretty little brunette of some twenty summers. On looking in the glass at her dainty little ears, she fancied how lovely a pair of diamond earrings would look in them. So one day she thought she would try on those of her mistress. How lovely she looked! said the looking-glass, and the Mephistopheles that is hidden in the corner of every man or woman’s breast suggested that she should keep them. This is how Mary Jane found herself in trouble, etc., etc.
The whole will read like a little story, probably entitled something like “Another Gretchen gone wrong through the love of jewels.”
The heading has to be thought of no less than the paragraph. Not a line is to be dull in a paper sparkling all over with eye-ticklers of all sorts. Oh! those delicious headings that would resuscitate the dead, and make them sit up in their graves!
A Tennessee paper which I have now under my eyes announces the death of a townsman with the following heading:
“At ten o’clock last night Joseph W. Nelson put on his angel plumage.”
.......
“Racy, catching advertisements supplied to the trade,” such is the announcement that I see in the same paper. I understand the origin of such literary productions as the following, which I cull from a Colorado sheet: