Query without chaining not working - Laravel

When I'm trying to fire query without chaining, my browser gets hanged - no response/error at all, but query with chaining works fine. I have read at many places that Laravel allows query even without using chaining. But don't know why its not working for me.

And by the way its just a demo project, so there is only 1 table in database named "users" having 50 records in that, so its not like that that browser gets hanged due to high amount of data returned as a query result.

Not working:

$users = User::where('first_name', 'LIKE', '%Leonie%');

$users -> get();

Working:

$users = User::where('first_name', 'LIKE', '%Leonie%') -> get();

I'm using latest Laravel version 5.2. All things are configured properly like database, application configuration etc..

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks.

via Chebli Mohamed