Page:Newspaper writing and editing.djvu/238



there were so many people in the streets who had important engagements and were trying their best to fill them. But by the time Nellie had moved into 340 Rossi and his force had arrived. There were also the police reserves from three stations, several fire companies with hooks and ladders, a squad of mounted cops, the entire force from the Grand Central Station, and enough mere spectators to do credit to a Chicago-New York baseball game at the Polo Grounds.

Vainly did Prof. Rossi endeavor to coax Nellie out by the way in which she had made entrance. Nothing would budge her, and if, as might well have been the case, the courtyard had been entirely surrounded by houses, it might have been necessary to pull one of them down to get her out. Fortunately, however, there's a vacant lot behind 340, but it was needful to break down two high board fences from the Thirty-third street side in order to get at her.

In the meantime Rossi's assistants had thoughtfully led the other three elephants, Petie, Rosa and Pierrette, down from the Hippodrome and lined them up in Thirty-third street, and when Nellie looked through the broken fences and saw her merry companions, she let out trumpet peals of delight and all but fell on their necks. So they marched her out into Thirty-third street and back to the Hipprodrome without further incident of note. And considering the pains she took to get into her Thirty-fourth street tenement she left it with extraordinarily little apparent regret.

When Prof. Rossi was asked last evening how he accounted for Nellie's performance, he replied in part:

"Name of a name! Name of a dog! Name of a pig! Sacred thousand thunders! Holy blue!"

In the separation of an old colored couple a reporter might see little to record in a news story, but, with an appreciation of the human interest in the event or with insight into the lives and feelings of the persons concerned, he might write a pathetic story like the following one adapted from the Pittsburgh Gazette Times:

They had climbed the hill together; well on the tottering way down they decided that they must travel the rest apart. Sylvester and Eva Hawkins signed papers to that effect yesterday. They are black folk, these two, old and black, but