Becker’s right hand was then gripped to the railing. He held his straw hat in his left hand, which, as his arm was bent backward and upward, rested against the small of his back. It is the plain truth that he took the blow without a quiver. After a second, it may be, he coughed just a little; a mere clearing of the throat. But his mouth was firm. His dark face lost no vestige of color. His black eyes turned toward the jurymen, who still avoided his glance, who looked everywhere but at the man they had condemned. If comment were needed, it would be that the _Sun_ reporter in the court-room at New Bedford had the advantage of describing a protagonist who, by her sex and by the very mystery that was left unsolved at her acquittal, was a far more dramatic figure than Stokes or the police lieutenant. The climaxes quoted are useful as an illustration of the advance of reporting from 1873, when the _Sun_ style was still forming, to 1893 and 1914, when it was fully formed; not as a comparison between what may not have been the best work of the reporter of the Stokes trial, Henry Mann, and the stories by Julian Ralph, who saw Lizzie Borden fall, and Edwin C. Hill, who wrote the Becker article. The _Sun_ omitted the weary introductions that had been the fashion in newspapers--leading paragraphs which told over again what was in the head-lines and were merely a prelude to a third and detailed telling. The _Sun_ reporter began at the beginning, thus: The Hon. John Kelly, wearing a small bouquet in the lapel of his coat, stepped out of his coach in front of Cardinal McCloskey’s residence in Madison Avenue just before eight o’clock yesterday morning. A few minutes later three other coaches arrived, and their occupants entered the house. Many of the neighbors knew that a niece of the cardinal was to be married to Mr. Kelly, and they strained their eyes through plate-glass windows in the hope that they might see the bride and the groom. Cardinal McCloskey, having been apprized of the arrival of the wedding-party, went to the chapel in the other part of the house, and at about a quarter past eight, the time fixed for the mass _pro sponsis_, the marriage ceremony was begun. In the longer and more important stories, the rule was adhered to as closely as possible. Prolixity, fine writing, and hysteria were taboo. Mark the calmness with which the _Sun_ reporter began his story of the most sensational crime of the late seventies: Two little mounds of red-colored earth around a small hole in the ground, and a few feet of downtrodden grass, were all that marked the last resting-place of Alexander T. Stewart yesterday morning. In the dead of the night robbers had dug into the earth above the vault, removed one of the stones that covered it, and stolen the body of the dead millionaire.