Prank

Scream after scream issued from a kitchen near Jericho, L. I. The door opened, a man entered, alarm written large upon his ordinarily phlegmatic countenance. The screams continued. He crossed the room quickly to the side of a robust woman who sat bowed over an oilcloth-covered table, screaming. He removed from her clutch a newspaper which seemed to be the cause of her extraordinary perturbation, spread it out so that the light of the kerosene lamp fell upon its crumpled front page. The woman fell silent to watch his face which, as he read, sharpened, paled with incredulous horror. The paper was a copy of the Daily News, Manhattan gum-chewers' sheetlet. In huge black capitals across its top leered the headline QUAKE SHAKES CITY. Beneath was a picture of the famed skyline of lower Manhattan, evidently taken from an airplane.

This picture showed the vertical city in the very moment of its demolition by the earthquake (TIME, Mar. 9, SCIENCE) to which the headline so meagrely referred. There was the proud tower of the Woolworth Building cracking like a piece of barley sugar; the Hudson River, a sea of incredible ferocity, was hurling its titanic waters upon a scene wherein buildings of granite, steel, cement, riven at their foundations, toppled insanely upon one another or hurtled separately through the air to melt into the yawning earth amid great ruin, confusion and desolation. The man who beheld this by the kitchen lamp turned his eyes, glazed with horror, upon the erstwhile screaming woman. They looked at each other with a wild conviction. The City of New York was utterly destroyed!

It was futile, the two perceived, to telephone for information. To attempt to reach a demolished metropolis by wire was a fantastic notion; and that anyone in Jericho could tell them more than the News announced was unlikely. They resigned themselves, waited. Next afternoon, earlier than usual, the man walked along the wagon-road to the village, bought his customary copy of the News, and, in addition, a copy of a rival gum-chewers' sheetlet known to the scornful as the Evening Pornographic, but to its readers simply as the Graphic. With trembling fingers, he scuffled the pages of these publications, looking for news about the devastated city. . . .

In the Graphic, two days later, he came upon an editorial. It was en- titled "An Artist's Dream and An Editor's Nightmare." Read he: "The slight earthquake which occurred last Saturday . . . was certainly news of such a kind that papers were under the strictest obligation to give all the facts and only the facts. . . .

"When the Daily News covered its front page with a picture of the skyscrapers of lower Manhattan toppling over in an artist's dream of chaos, while a line across the top of the page announced that 'Quake Rocks City,' it definitely overstepped the bounds that responsible newspapers observe in playing up the news.

"It reflects to the credit of the metropolitan press in general that practically every other paper in New York, in edipublic that this city is in no danger of being destroyed."

The amazed man of Jericho went on to peruse a letter appended to the Graphic editorial, in which a presumed Graphic reader, one L. A. Wilson, besought the Graphic to "take the lead in criticizing the scare headlines in some papers which use such low-down tactics," referred to "the recent but harmless tremor of the earth," arraigned the News for flaunting on its front page a picture of what might have happened ito this city in a serious earthquake," prophesied that such tactics "mean ruin in the end for a paper belching forth such rot," stated of the News that "no educational thoughts are offered in its pages ; it is just a plain money-making scheme."

The man, not knowing--as more constant readers of the Graphic know -that this sheet itself is not always above judicious juggling of news, of photographs, placed the editorial in his pocket as a talisman against falsehood, trudged back along the wagon-road to his once-cheerful kitchen.

/- They were wrong, however. The Horn & Hardart Co. seldom advertise.