Chapter IX: Feature Stories (2)

The line-up man is a product of New York and of nowhere else. He
belongs to a clan of agile, sinewy legged brethren who infest back
yards, and his business is to shin up the poles from which are
suspended innumerable clotheslines, to fix up frayed out lines, tie
on new ropes and get the courtyard rigging into shipshape condition
against the Monday wash. He will climb the highest pole in Harlem
without the aid of a net and fix your ropes for 25 cents.

“Lady, it is decidedly unsafe to trundle your baby about in that
rickety carriage,” is the greeting of the vender of rubber tires for
perambulators.

After convincing a startled mother that she has been carelessly
subjecting her child to terrible danger from capsizing, the crafty
salesman swoops down upon the carriage, tacks on a set of new tires,
tinkers up a rickety spoke, slaps a cracked hub together and goes on
his way with a merry quarter in his jeans. It’s another odd job.

Take the industrious sellers of keys. They come up to your tenement
home, knock at the door and ask whether you need a new key to the
chateau. If you have just lost your last key the keyhole genius
stoops down, twiddles around with a blank key and some beeswax, files
a couple of notches in the blank, and presto—you have a shining new
key all for ten cents. A locksmith would take two days and charge you
a quarter.

Precisely speaking, the man with the camera cannot be included in
this list of people who make a living out of curious jobs. Most folks
have seen him anchored on a bright corner of a Sunday afternoon
taking the pictures of one and all for the small sum of 10 cents.

When you have on your best bib and tucker you strike a dignified
pose, with your smaller sister leaning against you, and in two jerks
of a lamb’s tail your likeness is slipped upon the post card, which
is kept forever after in the family album, where in years to come you
gaze upon it and wonder how two such spindly legs supported such a
large child.

The man with the telescope doesn’t make a handsome income, and he
usually looks unhappy and ill at ease, but for a nickel he will show
you the ridges in the moon and the canals on Mars, and if the bulbous
top piece of the Metropolitan tower gets in the way it’s your own
fault and your nickel is lost.

Next comes what is in reality a woman’s calling, but strangely enough
it is followed by a large man with an extremely red face and a stubby
mustache. Children must like him because his business is checking
them while bargain seeking mammas thread their ways through the
aisles of stores.

He stands at the head of a line of baby carriages, soothing his round
faced charges and waving a tinkling strapful of ragged edged checks.
Upon delivery to him of the check which he gave you when you entered
the store you may receive again your baby. No check, no baby, just as
in the Chink’s place.

You mightn’t think that a man could eke out an existence selling
catnip. One does, though. He stands at an uptown corner with a
basketful of cat’s delight, selling it for two cents a bunch, and the
old maids in the vicinity make daily trips to his corner. When you’re
inclined to growl about your present salary, think of the man selling
catnip for two cents a bunch.

Here’s another funny occupation. A man goes around through the
sweatshop district mending shoes. If you are a sweatshop employee you
generally have one pair of shoes, and of necessity they are on your
feet. You can’t leave them with the cobbler when the roof springs a
leak or the uppers secede from the lowers. You haven’t time to sit
around his shop in your stockings.

So this itinerant cobbler hunts you up at your shop, takes off your
shoes while you sew and caulks up the seams, tacks on soles and
heels, and you pay him with a cheerful smile and some small change.

People who go downtown at night rarely miss seeing the man who
advertises various things through an electric sign on his chest. He
presses a button at intervals and a light flashes urging you to buy
a cigar or a stick of gum or something else. The right thing to say,
because everyone says it upon passing this individual, is, “That’s a
fine thing for a grown man to be doing.”

Down the bay there is another industry most people never hear of.
Enterprising venders owning their own boats meet incoming tramp
freighters and sell the crews everything from a pair of mittens to
a cough cure. They load their craft with most things you find in a
department store and they drive fine bargains with the sailors.

Among the newly arrived immigrants a number of men manage to scrape
a living by selling first lessons in English to the strangers
struggling with the tongue. These lessons are in the form of simple
English sentences followed by the translation in the tongue of the
foreigner. Five cents will buy enough assorted conversation to last a
new immigrant several weeks.

When in the course of his regular work the reporter comes upon a picturesque bit of local color, as did a writer on the New York _Evening Post_ in going through the Italian quarter of that city, he may use it to as good advantage as the _Post_ reporter did in the following feature story:

Under the tinsel, gilt, and colored paper shrine erected before a
café in Mulberry Street, just north of the Bend, there is a picture
of St. Mary of the Virgin Mount, and the devout who pass by drop
their mites into the plates. The clinking of pennies, nickels, and
quarters rings fair and true through the medley of sounds which rise
from the crowds about the push-carts, and it is music to the ear of
Michel Siniscalchi, giver of this year’s festa in honor of the saint.

A year ago they gave a festa in honor of Maria SS. di Monte Vergine,
as the placards and lithographs displayed in the shop windows style
her, and it proved a financial failure. It costs money to give a
festa—that is to say, a festa of the style and extent which are
necessary in doing adequate honor to this saint. In Italy, in the
villages from which the people who live about the Bend come, it is
customary to have a festa in honor of the saint every year. And it
seemed hard when the people who got up last year’s festa decided that
they did not again wish to have to shoulder the burden of the festa’s
bad debts.

At this time, when everybody else had backed down, Michel
Siniscalchi, who deals in colored glass bulbs and similar
decorations, stepped to the fore. He said it seemed a shame that they
could not honor the saint. Indeed he was so pained by the thought
that he would be willing to bear the expenses of the festa himself.
He would, of course, furnish all the decorations himself, and his
name would appear as president of the comitato on the banners and
placards.

This offer was accepted with glee by the men and more especially by
the women, who would have taken to heart the loss of a chance to
honor their saint. And Michel Siniscalchi set to work to organize his
festa. It was, by the way, part of the agreement, that the offerings
placed in the saint’s shrine should go to help Siniscalchi.

Colored lights were strung in arches over the narrow street at
frequent intervals, banners and yards of bunting draped the house
windows, the confetti men and peddlers of fruit and sweetmeats came
from blocks around, and on Saturday night the festa opened with much
braying of music and no little religious devotion.

The most important decoration was the shrine of the saint’s picture.
In a niche of the shrine the picture was placed, and rows of candles
were set before it and the tasseled cloth of gold on which it rests.
Then there were the plates and certain lithographic reproductions of
the picture.

Since Saturday night the festa has held full sway. There is a
preliminary celebration in the morning, and then everybody stops
until two o’clock in the afternoon. For a brief spell around dinner
time, every one but the band rests, and after dinner the people turn
out to listen to the music and to gossip. It is a great occasion for
gossip, the festa.

At present everybody is talking about the amount of money Michel
Siniscalchi may lose by his speculations. The old men sit before
the banca across the street from the shrine and chuckle over his
discomfiture, for, while yesterday and Saturday night the coins
clinked in the dishes with merry rapidity, now they barely dribble,
and, when a clink is heard, by its very novelty it strikes through
all other noises.

“Caught,” they chuckle. “Yes, our Michel is caught this time. A
cute one, he is. Yes, a cute one, Signor. No, not a politician. But
cute, so cute. Ay, and this time he has been caught. Has the signor
heard? The signor has but to cross the street and examine the blessed
saint’s shrine. ’Tis bare, Signor. Nought but pennies.”

But there are others who are not so sure that Michel Siniscalchi is
going to lose by his speculation. Among the younger generation of
Italians his scheme is treated with considerable respect, and his
Bowery friends wink when Michel’s intelligence is aspersed.

“Lose?” queried Jack Gallagher, sitting with a group of friends in
the café behind the shrine. “Lose, did you say? Aw, g’wan. Say,
Michel wasn’t born yesterday. He’s got his brains in his head. He’s
too rapid for dese wops. Michel’s got a business eye, he has. He’s
thinking of advertisin’. See that sign up there? See Michel’s name on
it, good and big? See them lights? All from Michel’s store. Aw, he’s
a wise guy. He knows his game.”

While Gallagher talked, the infrequent pennies, with an occasional
nickel, dropped into the plates, and presently the figure was carried
toward Spring Street, with at least 150 women and children and a band
in the procession.

Simplicity and naturalness may be given to an explanatory article by putting it in the form of an interview with the person from whom the information is obtained; this was done in the following story from the New York _Sun_:

“For the last three years I have devoted my summer to making balanced
aquariums to order,” said a woman who is now in middle life. “I earn
enough by this work to keep me comfortably during the winter, so I
call myself a successful woman wage earner.

“I make my aquariums as nearly a perfect reproduction of natural
conditions as possible. It is only since the discovery of balanced
aquariums that the full decorative effect of displays of aquatic
life has begun to be realized. Now many architects and interior
decorators include them in their plans. This is true not only of
country places but of many of the newest city homes. Certainly there
is no easier and cheaper way to keep some living thing about the
house. The care of the balanced aquarium amounts to so little that it
may be practically disregarded.

“The cost of the vessel depends entirely upon the wishes of the
person who is filling it. It may be an ordinary fruit jar with a wide
mouth or a glass tank costing $20 or more. The simplest tanks cost
about $1 and are of something more than one gallon capacity. They may
be had either rectangular in shape or globular. For an eight gallon
tank of domestic glass I have paid as little as $2.50. The main
essential is to have a tank perfectly tight and clean, with no paint
or other injurious material to contaminate the water.

“To begin with, the water should be as pure as the water we drink.
The bottom should be covered with pebbles and sand to the depth of
two inches with the plants rooted in it. There is a great variety of
aquatic plants that may be had at a cost of from 10 cents to half a
dollar a bunch. Of them all fanwort is the most valuable. Hornwort,
water starwort, tape grass, water poppy, willow moss, milfoil and
a number of floating plants such as lemma, duckweed, salvinia,
hydrocharis and hyacinth are among the most important varieties. If
one has lived long enough on any water course in the country to know
these plants, taking them from their native soil and transplanting
them to the sand of the aquarium is a simple matter.

“The most important occupants of the aquarium are the fish, and great
care should be taken not to put in too many for the size of the tank.
The basis of the balanced aquarium is one fish, say three inches in
length, to each gallon of water. If your tank holds five gallons of
water you could not make a well balanced aquarium by putting ten fish
three inches long in it. If the fish are smaller the number to the
gallon can be very greatly increased.

“Gold fish or golden carp are the most popular stock for an aquarium,
and the common varieties can be had for ten cents each. This price
means the best fish of these varieties. If there is more money to
be spent I would advise purchasing some of the really marvellously
colored Japanese varieties.

“These fish have wonderful flowing tails with colors that change
as though by magic from week to week. In the case of the variety
known as the telescope fish the color to begin with is velvety black
and gradually becomes silvery, then white, and after three years a
wonderful orange red. Nearly all varieties of goldfish are constantly
changing their colors, which range from black to silver and many
shades of amber and golden red.

“There is an almost endless variety of these beautiful Japanese
fish to choose from, the more common of which include the fantails,
fringetails and comets. Good specimens of these varieties may be
bought at from 25 cents to $5 each. The bulgy eyed telescope fish,
the aristocrats of the aquarium world, will cost from $5 apiece up,
according to size, color, shape and eyes.

“In addition to the Japanese fish there are many other rare varieties
suited to balanced aquariums. Among the most popular are the banded
tench, the banded sunfish, the paradise fish, the bitterling and the
golden tench. Besides these I have orders for many varieties of our
own native waters.

“Such orders usually come to me singly, and the one giving the order
is quite willing to pay the cost of having his taste suited. These
people, usually men, want an aquarium with the fish of their boyhood
days. They candidly admit that they wish them as reminders of the
happy days long past.

“Where native fish are wanted I usually use sunfish, dace, catfish,
minnows, sticklebacks, chub, mirror carp, rockfish, small eels,
alligators, newts, frogs and turtles of all sizes and shapes and
colors. I always when possible have a snail, tadpole or a few newts
in my aquariums, as they are scavengers and will consume much of the
decaying matter thrown off by the plants, besides preventing the
green scum that will form in still bodies of water.

“Beginners must be particular not to mix their fish indiscriminately.
They must always remember that goldfish cannot live in peace with
catfish, sunfish, eels, turtles, crawfish, rockfish or sticklebacks.
If this rule is not observed, the goldfish will eventually lose the
battle for life and be killed.

“Goldfish if properly cared for live to a great age. There is an
aquarium in Washington where the goldfish are known to be more than
fifty years old.

“Balanced salt water aquariums are as easily made and kept as those
of fresh water. Of course they must be filled with sea water fresh
from the sea and all the inhabitants must be the young of various sea
creatures, such as crabs, starfish, shrimps, and anemones. The plant
life also must be the varieties that flourish in the sea, and where
possible I believe in taking the pebbles and sand from a sea washed
beach.

“Beginners must be careful about two points. First, in making
aquariums they must not overcrowd them by trying to have too many
fish for the volume of water. Second, they must not overfeed their
pets. Failure to observe these two rules causes more trouble than all
other points connected with the making and care of aquariums.

“In a balanced aquarium the daily care consists in feeding the fish
with prepared wafers, dried ants’ eggs, or fish food. Fish should
never be fed more than they will eat up clean at the time.

“Fortunately fish are subject to few diseases. The amateur has only
to remember that salt water is the cure-all for sick fish. If a fish
is out of health and the trouble is caused neither by overcrowding
nor by overfeeding, a five minutes bath in salt water every day for
a week will in nine cases out of ten restore it to its usual good
health and spirits.

“All that is necessary to catch the sick fish is a small net that can
be conveniently handled in the aquarium. Though I have been making
aquariums of different sorts ever since I was a small country girl, I
still use a net and avoid touching the inmates with my hands unless
it is positively necessary.

“When I catch my own fish from their native waters I use a small net,
very little larger than the one used in the aquariums, and a minnow
bucket. These are my only tools.

“I find a ready sale for all the aquariums I have time to make after
filling my special orders. Of course there are seasons when the
demand is more brisk than others. When those times come I always have
a dozen aquariums on hand which I have stocked either for my own
satisfaction or to try some new theory.”

The interview form may be combined with a character sketch and biographical material in order to give the reader a glimpse of the speaker’s personality as well as an account of his or her work. The selection from the New York _Times_ given below is the first part of a long article which is in the form of an interview after this introduction:

Even when Mrs. Alice Stebbins Wells fishes about in her bag and
produces her policeman’s star for verification one can hardly
believe that she is the famous first “policewoman” of Los Angeles.
Scarcely five feet in height, slender, with a mild, almost timorous
voice and a pair of very round blue eyes, Mrs. Wells presents an
appearance about as formidable as that of a kitten. Yet she has been
permanently appointed as a regular member of the police force of a
city of 400,000, subject to the same regulations, vested with the
same authority, and under civil service, as any male member of Los
Angeles’ bluecoat squad. She makes arrests and prefers charges in the
same way and with as much success as any policeman, and is a very
substantial vindication of the power of personality in an institution
where brute force and a six-foot stature have formerly been thought
to be indispensable prerequisites. Here is what she says of a phase
of police work:

“And do I carry weapons? No, indeed. That is something which I do not
feel called upon to do. I am very firmly convinced that under the
right conditions a policeman would not have to carry a weapon at all.
But before the policeman can give up his gun and his stick, weapons
must not be sold indiscriminately to citizens. The only reason now
that a policeman requires a weapon is because the other fellow may
have one, and the law must enforce its demands against all objection.
It is a very sad commentary on our civilization that guns and brass
knuckles are displayed openly for sale, and that almost the only
restriction in our most careful communities is a provision for a
license, which is easily obtained.”

Mrs. Wells is the first woman to be appointed to a police force
in any city of the United States. The woman detective, the police
matron, the probation officer, the district nurse, are all places
which have been filled by women, and were of course the forerunners
of the policewoman. But while they were vested with partial
police authority their power was greatly restricted along certain
well-defined lines, and they did not work in recognized co-operation
with the police department.

Before entering her work on the Los Angeles police force Mrs.
Wells had been in active training as a social worker. The general
attitude which she takes toward that stratum of society with which
she comes most in contact is hinted at in her adaptation of the
philanthropist’s, the cheery social worker’s, vocabulary. Mrs. Wells
never resorts to the threadbare term of “uplift,” but puts in its
place that rather more welcome “upbuilding.”

Returning to California from social work in the East, Mrs. Wells
entered upon a scientific study of crime. She became impressed with
the importance of the police department in its capacity to prevent
crime as well as to punish it, and was convinced of the need of
women workers on the inside of the police department to strengthen
the emphasis on the side of prevention. She set to work to obtain
signatures to a petition for a woman police officer, which resulted
very promptly in her appointment to the police force of Los Angeles,
where she has been at work for the last three years.

In addition to her regular police duties, Mrs. Wells conducts a
bureau of information to which clubs and civic organizations which
are working to obtain women on the police force of their home cities
may apply. She is now on a six months’ leave of absence, not only to
investigate conditions throughout the country, but to carry on her
“campaign” for women police. She is speaking before city clubs and
organizations of every sort, and is visiting the mayor and chief of
police in every city.

“I have spoken all the way across the continent and I shall speak all
the way back. I realize that I am in a way doing propaganda work.
When I applied for my appointment in Los Angeles I thought chiefly of
the immediate work to be done right there by a woman. But when I was
appointed, then came this—this terrifying publicity—and I realized
what it meant.

“I realized that I should have to stand behind a sort of ‘movement’
for women in the police departments of other cities, just because I
was the first in the field.”

Effective presentation of the life and the character of a man who has “done things” is illustrated by the following “personality sketch” by Mr. Brand Whitlock, published in the _American Magazine_, but equally well adapted for newspaper publication:

Those citizens of Ohio who a dozen years ago used to throng the
big circus-tent in which Tom L. Johnson was then making his first
campaigns in the country districts will recall the figure of the
slender youth with the Grecian profile and the fair hair who used
to stand there under the flaring light and speak of fundamental
democracy. They, or those of them who were accessible to such
impressions, caught something of the spirit of youthful idealism that
was in the young man; if they did not, his presence and personality
gave them reassurance, for attendance on one of Tom Johnson’s
meetings in those days was, in Ohio, an enterprise to impart the
thrill of a spicy and dangerous adventure. Time flies, and time has
flown fast in this last decade, and the political ideas that Herbert
S. Bigelow was helping Tom Johnson to disseminate, though they were
flouted and scorned then as heretical, insane, and wicked, have since
become, by the inevitable and monotonous operation of the universal
law of progress, conventional, respectable, orthodox, and popular.

Herbert Bigelow was then not many years out of Lane Theological
Seminary—strange spectacle in Ohio, that of a minister addressing
Democratic meetings!—and he was pastor of the Vine Street
Congregational Church, in Cincinnati. Vine Street Congregational
Church was in itself an instance of the operation of the old law.
Before the Civil War it was a hotbed of abolition when abolition was
unpopular and unorthodox even in Ohio, though everybody in Ohio is an
abolitionist to-day, and, if he is old enough, claims to have been so
then. But after the war the Vine Street Church became respectable,
with a cold and formal atmosphere of black walnut and musty cushions
of a magenta shade, and when Herbert Bigelow began to preach a
somewhat too literal application of the social ethics of Jesus, not
to Hankow or Kordofan, but to Cincinnati, there was a disconcerting
rustle in the pews, the tendency of that doctrine being to decrease
the revenues of the church in an inverse ratio to the increase in the
number of human beings in the congregation.

It is an interesting story, not to be told here in detail, of how
Herbert Bigelow struggled, of how they tried to get him out of his
pulpit, and of how he worked for a long time without salary, until
Daniel Kiefer devised means of financing the institution, so that it
lost its ecclesiastical atmosphere, became a People’s Church or forum
for free speech, and moved into a theater where radicals preach their
various and conflicting heresies on Sunday afternoons, after moving
pictures have illustrated the progress of the species.

Meanwhile Herbert Bigelow was increasingly prominent in political
reform movement; he lectured everywhere, wrote articles for radical
publications, organized the Ohio Direct Legislation League, and
poured all his energy into the propaganda of the initiative and
referendum. The privileged interests opposed him, of course, and
still oppose him. One way they did it was to call him Reverend;
whenever it was necessary to frighten “good” people, by holding
up his image, they printed the Reverend with the subtle and
sinister implication of quotation-marks; whenever it was necessary
to influence “bad” people, printing the Reverend without the
quotation-marks.

But Herbert Bigelow was an idealist growing day by day more
practical. He had had hard knocks in boyhood; he knew what it was
to be poor; he had a love of his fellow man; he was saddened and
appalled by the shadow of poverty everywhere, the shadow which so
many are too blind to see, or too selfish and cowardly to admit. But
this spirit of sympathy and of pity in him had been somehow ordered,
organized, and made coherent by the philosophy of Henry George, and
when that vision came to him, as does nearly every other who has a
vision, he went to work for social justice.

His great opportunity came when, last year, a convention was called
to draft a new constitution for Ohio, and he set out to impress the
people with the fact that it was their opportunity. He organized the
Ohio Progressive Constitution League, with subsidiary leagues in
every county; he worked all summer; and through that league, aided
and inspired by what the lecturers call the Spirit of the Times, a
majority of delegates elected to the convention were pledged to the
principles of direct legislation.

And for the first half of the year Mr. Bigelow was at Columbus,
presiding over the constitutional convention as its president. At
forty his figure is no longer slender; it has taken on the rotundity
of the middle years; but as he sat there in gray tweeds, with the
yellow hair hanging over his forehead, smiling, it must have been
gratifying to him now and then to reflect that his old heresies had
become so orthodox in his own time. The convention adopted articles
providing for home rule for cities, for a license system to control
the liquor traffic, for equal suffrage, for verdicts in civil cases
by a three-fourths vote of the jury, for the welfare of labor, and,
under Mr. Bigelow’s leadership, a clause adopting the initiative and
referendum in the State. When the vote was taken, and Herbert Bigelow
had the satisfaction of announcing the triumph of the principle he
had so long advocated, it was a moment that all his friends were glad
to have him experience. The irony in which the fates usually award
their laurels was not wanting in that instance, for in the clause
there is a proviso that the initiative and referendum shall not be
used by the people to adopt the single tax, supposed, in Ohio, to
be a method of despoiling farmers by taxing land according to its
superficial area. But Herbert Bigelow, whom fate taught long ago,
like Josh Whitcomb, to accommodate himself to circumstances and to
take what he can get, smiles and is happy; and his friends are happy
with him.

SUGGESTIONS

1. Find the “human interest” in current events.

2. Notice the comedy and tragedy in life.

3. Look for good subjects for character sketches.

4. Look to future events as well as to current news for subjects for
feature articles.

5. Jot down suggestions for feature articles.

6. File news clippings, statistics, and other material bearing on good
subjects.

7. Write your feature article while it is new and timely.

8. Give your article timeliness by connecting it with topics of current
interest.

9. Don’t forget that the story that touches the reader’s heart is the
story he remembers.

10. Make your pathetic story simple and restrained.

11. Don’t confuse sentiment with sentimentality.

12. Avoid cheap humor and vulgar slang.

13. Don’t ridicule another’s religion, race, or nationality.

14. Make your explanation clear to a reader who knows nothing about the
subject.

15. Use incidents, anecdotes, and concrete examples for clearness and
interest.

16. Avoid technical and scientific terms.

17. Let your first sentence arouse interest and curiosity.

PRACTICE WORK

1. Write a humorous animal story based on the material in the following
news story:

Just because they thought an ostrich was a timid, harmless sort
of creature, two men, one white and one black, were badly hurt at
Mineola, Long Island, yesterday. Each of the men tried to catch and
hold an ostrich at the Mineola Fair Grounds. The negro was kicked in
the face, and landed about 20 feet from the bird; the white man was
kicked in the chest and knocked down and had his clothes torn off him.

The ostrich that did all the damage is named Fleetwing. He and
another ostrich, named Fleetfoot, arrived from Florida in two
crates yesterday morning. They were brought to Mineola to race on
the fair grounds this week at the fair of the Queens-Nassau County
Agricultural Society. The birds have been trained to run races and
pull light sulkies to which they are harnessed.

They are bad tempered, however, and are kept blindfolded frequently
when they are not racing. A blindfolded ostrich is gentle as a lamb.

The blinding hood slipped off the eyes of Fleetwing at the fair
grounds yesterday morning and in an instant the big bird was out of
its crate, which was not covered. It started off on a run, and about
two hundred persons ran after it. There was a merry chase around and
around the racing track, and finally the ostrich was cornered.

A big negro looked at the ostrich and said:

“I reckon there ain’t no chicken ever were raised that I couldn’t
hold, boss. I’ll hold his laig, an’ then you grab his haid.”

The negro wrapped his arms about one of Fleetwing’s legs and in a
second was lifted into the air and landed about 20 feet away, with an
ugly wound in the side of his face. Then Keeper Ford approached the
ostrich from the front, and got an uppercut on his diaphragm, cutting
his chest and tearing his clothes. Finally the ostrich was roped and
recrated.

“That ain’t no chicken,” said the negro as he watched these
proceedings from a safe distance. “That there’s a two-laiged mule.”

2. Make a more entertaining “Zoo” story out of the facts in the
following article:

The Chinese wildcat in the Central Park Zoo has received a new lease
of life, according to the keepers there, and a graphophone may be
used now to make life seem more worth while to him. If this plan is
adopted one of the machines will collect sounds in Mott Street that
are expected to help to cure the cat’s recurrent fits of nostalgia,
which is the dictionary name for homesickness.

There is a box nailed to the wall by the side of the quarters of the
lady hippopotamus and her young son, and on a shelf of this lies all
day long a slim and long-bodied little animal with green eyes and a
sweeping tail. The yellow sign says that it is a “Felis Chinensis.”
He may take exercise at night, but all day he is motionless, still,
apparently melancholy, noticing nothing.

He is in surroundings that offer little congeniality. The lady hippo
and her young son are out of his class. The capybara not only is from
South America, but is like a rat magnified some two hundred times.
The lions across the aisle are from climes unknown to the Chinese
wildcat. Practically everything in the Central Park Zoo has long
ago learned how to eat peanuts, and has thus become more or less
Americanized. The Felis Chinensis will not have peanuts.

Last week a couple of Chinamen, rare visitors at the Zoo, strayed
into the lion house, stopping before the home of the wildcat. The
minute he heard their talk he jumped from his shelf and began purring
and rubbing himself against the side of his box. He played ball with
a chicken bone on the floor, and had a good time. The uplift he got
from this rode him along joyously for two days afterward.

And there is a plan on foot, say the keepers, to collect Mott Street
sounds in a graphophone for the Felis Chinensis, if more laundrymen
don’t visit the Zoo. There is some apprehension, however, as to how
the lions and the tiger will take the graphophone.

3. Use the facts in the following clipping as the basis for an amusing
hunting story:

A rabbit that residents of Sayville, L. I., declare plays on the
piano has taken possession of a big house near Oakland, owned by
Alexander H. Hunter. Mr. Hunter and his family are in Europe, and
until they return bunny will lord it over parlor and pantry.

The rabbit didn’t go into the house because it wanted to. It was
chased there by men with guns and dogs intent on taking its life, and
the rabbit, unwilling to yield itself up for stew, bolted into the
Hunter house via a drain pipe.

This was the way of it:

Herman Schmidt and a friend went out with dogs and guns yesterday for
a hunt, and the hounds soon started the particular Br’er Rabbit who
is making faces at the hunters from the front window of the Hunter
place. When the dogs got close Br’er Rabbit didn’t hesitate. He laid
his ears back and was away like a streak, with dogs and men in hot
pursuit.

Toward the Hunter home ran the hunted and hunters, and it looked as
if Schmidt would have a rabbit stew for supper. But the hunters had
not calculated on a drain pipe which stuck out of the ground about
150 yards from the house, and great was their chagrin when cunning
Br’er Rabbit whisked into it and disappeared.

Now that pipe leads right into the Hunter house, and pretty soon the
hunters saw bunny at one of the windows. When they approached he
retreated to the piano and kept running back and forth over the keys,
making soft music.

There is no caretaker in the house, and the possibility of the damage
that the rabbit will do, for which the hunters may have to pay, is
appalling.

On the other hand, the rabbit may have to come out of the house to
get something to eat. If he does he will get a warm reception at the
end of the drain pipe. A couple of dogs are lurking about there. They
tried hard to get into the pipe but they were too wide.

4. Write a pathetic story, using the particulars given in the following
narrative:

Dog Catcher Larson visited the Home for the Friendless with his
little blue wagon Thursday afternoon, and he left behind him one
hundred little tots with saddened hearts and cheeks that burned with
scalding tears.

The bewhiskered dog catcher is no respecter of persons or of
dogs. The high and low are the same to him, and he recognizes
no distinction between the poodle and the fice. And so Thursday
afternoon he gathered in the little pet of the children of the Home
of the Friendless.

True, it was the pet of these little unfortunates. True, that they
had raised this little dog, and that now it was only seven months
old—not old enough to know about Atlanta’s dog law. Still, Jerry had
no tag, and tagless Jerry therefore must take his place in the blue
wagon and must await his turn to be ducked to death.

The children had no money and so could not pay the dollar for the
tag. Now that the dog was arrested, still less did they have the
$2.25 necessary to save him from a watery grave.

One and all they went to bed with heavy hearts, and as they knelt
down beside their beds they did not forget to put in a word for “Poor
Jerry!”

Friday morning the pangs of sorrow were too great, and their grief
burst forth in wails. Jerry had been a companion to them, a faithful
friend and a source of solace and comfort. He had never deserted
them—and then Jerry was theirs, had been fed by them, raised by them,
taught by them.

They knew it was not their fault he had not been tagged, and also
they knew that Jerry was not to blame. And so they appealed to the
superintendent. They begged, pleaded, cried. Nothing would suffice
but the restoration of their fice.

The superintendent appealed to the mayor, the mayor to the probation
officer, and now the probation officer is trying to touch the heart
of the dog catcher.

All of the children are writing letters to city officials. “The cook
got mad with Jerry,” writes little Ruth Wilson, “because he stole two
of Mother Henry’s chickens, but Jerry didn’t mean any harm. Cook gave
the dog to the dog catcher. We have got all the cats we want, but
only one little dog—and that is Jerry. Please give him back to us,
for we love him very much.”

5. With the facts given in the news story below as a basis, write a
pathetic feature story.

Moving pictures inspired ten boys to “lynch” Harry Werner, their
9-year-old playmate, in Glencoe yesterday. So serious are his
injuries that he may be crippled for life.

It was a “wild west” picture, absurd to the practical mind in its
unrealities, that gave the boys their idea.

They saw in the flickering pictures a score of “cowboys,” their
revolvers strapped on the wrong side, while they mounted their horses
also from the wrong side, and rode with the grace and skill of wooden
Indians.

The boys did not notice these details. They saw only the rakishness
and swaggering daredeviltry. They applauded vociferously the
“stringing-up” of the actor-cowboy.

“Let’s play wild west,” one 10-year-old enthusiast proposed after the
show. The vote was unanimous.

Wooden revolvers were fashioned. Fathers’ discarded hats took the
place of sombréros. Broom sticks served as prancing bronchos.

“Who’ll we lynch?” one asked. Harry Werner was selected. His dark
hair and eyes led to his unwilling selection by them for the rôle of
“villain.”

They tied a clothes-line under his arms and threw the rope over a
branch of a tree. Whooping madly, in true moving-picture-wild-west
fashion, they pulled him up until his feet were far from the ground.

The thin rope cut into his tender flesh. He struggled and implored
his comrades to let him down. His pleas brought renewed whoops. Had
not the “villain” in the moving-picture struggled and cried for mercy?

For half an hour they kept him there. Then they cut the rope and let
his body fall to the ground. Their childish eyes did not see that he
was unconscious. They seized the rope and dragged him for several
minutes, leaving him on the ground to find his way home alone.

Physicians who examined him declared that he may be disabled
permanently.

6. Rewrite the following humorous story, making it more effective in
every way possible.

Tommy is a hero to-day. All his playmates that live on Greene
street, near Wolcott avenue, are envious, and speak to him in awed
whispers, for did he not go to hunt a Saracen and return covered with
bean-juice and glory? All their mothers, too, are keeping a sharp
watch on the family crockery.

This is how it happened:

Papa Devine had told Tommy about a lot of men who called themselves
Crusaders, who went to lick a lot of other chaps known as Saracens.
And when papa told him how the Crusaders wore armor plates on their
chests and backs and arms and legs and big helmets on their heads,
Tommy decided that he would take a crack at the Saracens himself.

When Papa Devine went out, and Mamma Devine was busy upstairs, Tommy
thought it would be a good time to start on his crusade.

Going into the kitchen, he tied a frying pan about his neck so that
it hung down over his stomach, strung the lid of the clothes boiler
over his back, and then sought a helmet that would resist the swords
and battle-axes of the enemy.

As he pondered he sniffed the air. Then a bright idea came.
Cautiously he opened the stove door. Mamma Devine was cooking beans à
la Boston and Tommy Devine drew forth a big round stone pot full of
the delicious fruit. Carefully he emptied the contents into the sink
and thrust the pot on his head.

The bean juice ran down into his eyes and ears, but that
didn’t matter—he was going to hunt Saracens. Then the pot felt
uncomfortable, and Tommy decided to take it off and refit it to his
head.

Horrors! The pot would not budge. It was stuck on his head. Pull as
he might he could not get it off. He sat down in the corner to plan
a campaign of action, and consoled himself with licking the dripping
bean treacle from his nose end. That got tiresome after a while, so
Tommy sought his mother.

Mrs. Devine scolded over the lost beans at first, and then tried
to remove the pot, but she, too, was unsuccessful. Then she became
alarmed. In desperation she started for the doctor’s with the pot
still on Tommy’s head, the pans jangling around his neck, and the
bean juice running down his back.

Passengers in the street car dropped their papers in amazement, for
they did not know that Tommy was a crusader, while Mrs. Devine
looked out of the window and tried to make it appear that crusading
was an every day affair.

But Tommy’s tears and wails attracted the attention of an old man. He
stopped the car and called the motorman, who came with his controller
handle in his hand.

“Crack the blamed thing off,” ordered the old man.

The motorman cracked, and off fell the jar. Tommy set up a whoop of
joy, and Mrs. Devine hurried home to give the erstwhile crusader a
bath—and a spanking.