Questions such as these will be met by the council committee on buildings, which tomorrow will take up an inquiry into the Pearl 5-cent theatre case. The roof of the Pearl, Western avenue and Downey street, caved in last Monday morning and a disaster was averted because no show was in progress at the time.
A type of lead that has some vogue has a very short first sentence that usually states the most significant fact in the story. This short statement may be followed by a longer explanatory one that contains the other essential details, or by a series of short sentences each of which contains an important detail. This kind of lead is in reality only the breaking up of the long one-sentence lead containing all the essentials, into two or more shorter sentences. Greater emphasis is thus gained for the particulars set off in the short sentences. Examples of these leads are:
(1)
Col. Roosevelt is back. He spoke tonight at Madison Square Garden to 15,000 people. They cheered him for forty-two minutes.
There was no indication throughout this storm of applause that it was anything but spontaneous. It was directed at Col. Roosevelt himself.
(2)
The “fatherless frog” is in Washington. He arrived here this morning. He has two big bulging green[Pg 85] eyes, a big white throat, and for all the world looks just the same as millions of his brothers who occupy thrones on lily pads in some muddy creek. According to Prof. Jacques Loeb of the Rockefeller Institute of Research, however, this particular Mr. Frog, on exhibition before the Congress of Hygiene and Demography here, was hatched from the egg of a female by chemical process.
While visitors are greatly interested in this orphan frog, learned professors are busy challenging his chemical parentage.
Professor Loeb says that his fatherless frog is the culmination of years of effort and that with but little more study he will be able to produce other forms of life resulting from his study of parthenogenesis.
In the less conventional types of leads, various beginnings are used, often to excellent advantage, for novelty and variety. The two examples given below show some marked departures from the usual kinds of beginnings.