Probably the most restrained lead on a _Sun_ account of a great disaster was the introduction to the article on the Brooklyn Theatre fire of 1876: The Brooklyn Theatre was built in September, 1871, opened for public entertainment October 2, 1871, and burned to the ground with the sacrifice of three hundred lives on the night of Tuesday, December 5, 1876. Of a more literary character, yet void of excitement, was the way Julian Ralph began his narrative of the blizzard of March, 1888: It was as if New York had been a burning candle upon which nature had clapped a snuffer, leaving nothing of the city’s activities but a struggling ember. While on this subject, it is as well to say that the _Sun_, in ordinary stories, does without introductions. “Begin at the beginning” has been one of its unwritten rules; or, as a veteran copy-reader remarked to a new reporter who told it all in the first paragraph: “For the love of Mike, can’t you leave something for the head-writer to say?” Every young newspaper man hears a good deal about “human-interest stories.” Some of the professors of journalism tell their pupils what human-interest stories are; others advise the best way to know one, or to get one. It is not evident, however, that any one has devised an infallible formula for taking a trivial or commonplace event and, by reason of the humour, pathos, or liveliness thereof, lifting it to a higher plane. Amos Cummings is believed to have been the first newspaperman to see the news value of the lost child or the steer loose in the street. Amos himself wrote a story about the steer. Ralph wrote another one, and got his first job in New York on the strength of it. Frank W. O’Malley wrote one recently, and made New York laugh over it. But your newspaperman needs something besides a frightened steer and some streets; he must have “something in his noddle,” as Mr. Dana used to say. Every reporter gets a chance to write a story about a lost child, but there are perhaps only two lost-child stories of the last thirty years that are remembered, and both were _Sun_ stories. David Graham Phillips found his lost child in the Catskills and wrote an article over which women wept. The next time a child was lost, Phillips’s city editor sent him on the assignment, and he fell down. The child was there, and the woods, and the bloodhounds, but the reporter’s brain would not turn backward and go again through the processes that made a great story. Hill’s story, which is remembered by its head--“A Little Child in the Dark”--will never be repeated--by Hill.