Very whimsical desires find expression in the advertising columns of the day. A lady of companionable habits, wishing to meet with a lady or gentleman requiring a companion, would prefer to act as such to ‘one who, from circumstances, is compelled to lead a retired life.’ A stylish and elegant widow, a good singer and musician, possessing energy, business knowledge, and means of her own, ready, ‘for the sake of a social home,’ to undertake the supervision of a widower’s establishment, thinks it well to add, goodness knows why, ‘a Radical preferred.’ Somebody in search of a middle-aged man willing to travel, stipulates for a misanthrope with bitter experience of the wickedness of mankind; displaying as pleasant a taste as the proprietor of a wonderful discovery for relieving pain and curing disease without medicine, who wants a partner in the shape of a consumptive or asthmatical gentleman.
Your jocular man, lacking an outlet for his wit, will often pay for the privilege of airing his humour in public. Here are a few examples. ‘Wanted, a good Liberal candidate for the Kilmarnock Burghs. Several inferior ones given in exchange.’—‘Wanted a Thin Man who has been used to collecting debts, to crawl through keyholes and find debtors who are never at home. Salary, nothing the first year; to be doubled each year afterwards.’—‘Wanted, Twelve-feet planks at the corners of all the streets in Melbourne, until the Corporation can find some other means of crossing the metropolitan creeks. The planks and the Corporation may be tied up to the lamp-posts in the dry weather.’—‘Wanted, a Cultured Gentleman used to milking goats; a University man preferred.’—‘Correspondence is solicited from Bearded Ladies, Circassians, and other female curiosities, who, in return for a true heart and devoted husband, would travel during the summer months, and allow him to take the money at the door.’—‘Wanted, a Coachman, the ugliest in the city; he must not, however, have a moustache nor red hair, as those are very taking qualities in certain households at present. As he will not be required to take care of his employer’s daughter, and is simply engaged to see to the horses, he will only be allowed twenty dollars per month.’
A great deal might be said about pictorial advertisements, if the impossibility of reproducing them did not stand in the way. As it is, we must content ourselves with showing how an advertisement can be illustrated without the help of draughtsman or engraver. By arranging ordinary printers’ types thus:
an ingenious advertising agent presents the public with portraits of the man who does not and the man who does advertise, and says: ‘Try it, and see how you will look yourself.’
A STRANGE INSTITUTION.
Amongst the oral traditions of the past in Cambridge, there is handed down to the modern undergraduate an account of a secret Society which was established in the university at a remote period of time, and which was called the Lie Society. At the weekly meetings of the members, an ingenious falsehood was fabricated, which frequently referred to some person locally known, and which was probably not altogether free from scandal. It was the duty of all the members to propagate this invented story as much as possible by relating it to every one they met. Each member had to make a note of the altered form in which the lie thus circulated came round to him individually, and these were read out at the next meeting with all the copious additions and changes the story had received passing from one to the other, often to such an extent as to leave but little of the original fabric left. After a time the Society began to languish, and soon after disappeared altogether.
In the dim past, and before the present stringent regulations were made as to examinations in the Senate House, another secret Society was organised, called the Beavers, which was for the purpose of enabling members, when being examined, to help each other by a system of signals. With this view, one of the members of the Beavers was told off by lot to perform various duties assigned to him, such as engaging the attention of the examiners, and giving information as to the papers by preconcerted signs. This Society soon collapsed. To one of its members is credited the ingenious watch-faced Euclid, and the edition of Little-go-classics on sleeve-links.
MY HOME IN ANNANDALE REVISITED.
I leave with joy the smoky town,