sitting patiently on the pyramid of dripping
steps, awaiting the arrival of the slow and
heavy carriages that were to take them to their
building at the bottom of the Ocean.

SMALL SHOT.
TRAP ADVERTISING

.A CORRESPONDENT writes:

An amusing article in the first number of your
periodical exposes certain traps which are set in
the advertisement columns of the newspapers, and
the folly of persons who are caught in them by
their own credulity.

But there is a melancholy side of the subject.
There is a class of persons victimised by
these mock advertisements who, I think, deserve
pity. I am one of that class.

I am the wife of an Assistant-Surgeon. My
husband, has the entire charge of a branch
practice, with a salary of £80, a year. His
employer is anxious to extend this practice
amongst the better class in the neighbourhood,
and we are expected to keep up a genteel
appearance. The clergyman and his wife, our rich
neighbour and his wife, and a few of the gentry,
call on us occasionally. We return their calls,
with an eye to business, and we must be comme
il faut on all occasions.

I must not do our household work, or carry
my baby out, or I should lose caste. We must
keep a servant, my husband's professional suit
of black must be always in funereal order, his
trousers must not wear out too soon with riding,
or his boots with walking.

None but those who have tried, know how
difficult it is with all this to keep out of debt:
to say nothing of providing for a rainy day, which
is simply impossible.

"How can we best reduce our household
expenses?" "What is to be done with the next
quarter's salary?" are questions often asked
with anxious hearts, and seldom satisfactorily
answered.

My husband works hard, night and day,
for our support, and it grieves me to think
that I can do nothing to help him. I am living
a lady's idle life upon his hard-earned, narrow
means, and it often makes my heart ache to
know that I am in one sense a useless burden
upon him.

This is my constant trouble, and how to
remedy it is my ever-present thought. In such
a mood I take up a newspaper, and read several
advertisements offering employment to females
in any rank, in town or country. My reason
tells me that these offers are a fraud and a
deception, but I cannot help thinking how pleasant
it would be to be able to earn a little to add to
my husband's hardly-earned salary; how useful
even a few shillings weekly would be. I ponder
and hesitate: "It is but a few postage stamps;
I will write and inquire particulars."

The letters are written, and, as soon as they
are despatched, I begin really to hope for some
useful result, and look eagerly for the answers
by return of post. The answers arrive. The
first contains a betting or racing paper; the
second is a great improvement upon betting,
but hardly suitable for me; it is an invention for
a new process of staining glass. The third
answer is plausible but secret. The employment
has nothing to do with photography, betting,
papier maché, flower-making, &c. It is chiefly
reading and writing, and is very lucrative. "It
can be practised by any one in any station of
life, at their own homes," &c. Eighteen stamps
must be sent before particulars can be obtained.

"Reading and writing!" just what I should
like. What can it be? If I could follow it
profitably, what a relief it would be, and baby
could have her new clothes. "I think I will
send the stamps." The stamps are sent, and
now I really hope and hope on until, before the
answer comes, my hope has become faith. I am
almost afraid to open the letter, and when I do
open it, what a disappointment!

I am told to keep a registry-office for servants,
and to have a black board outside the house, on
which I am to copy advertisements, from the
local papers. The profit of this latter direction
is unintelligible to me. And this is the return
for my eighteen postage stamps; this is the
downfal of all the castles in the air.

Many persons would say to me, you are
rightly served, and deserve no pity. But I think
we are all prone to believe what we much wish
for, particularly in times of difficulty or distress.

DR. JOHNSON'S HOUSE IN BOLT-COURT.

The article entitled Dr. Johnson's Ghost,
in our fourth number, has evoked an
expostulation from Mr. Bensley, son of the worthy
printer, the contemporary of Richardson, and
who succeeded to the house after the great man's
death. Mr. Bensley writes, with generous solicitude,
to remove the slight spot of blame we
cast on the "ruthless printer" who, several
London guide-books incorrectly assert, pulled
down the house that Johnson's residence had,
in one sense, consecrated.

The corrections, sifted and summed up, come,
we find, to this: Mr. Bensley, senior, never
removed a brick of the venerated house. He
guarded it with all the loving care that men
keep the faded yellow letter and the folded curl
of some dead love; but Time was as watchful
for destruction as the good printer for preservation,
and in 1817 he found it necessary to re-roof
and generally "do up" the premises.

There was a fire on Mr. Bensley's premises
in 1807, but it did not injure the Johnson
rooms. In 1819, however, the imprisoned demon
that is always planning our destruction broke out
with victorious fury, and totally destroyed
Johnson's house in Bolt-court—the room he worked
in and the room he died in—leaving only its
shadow, eternal for us all, in the pages of Boswell.
No building (and let us strongly emphasise
this for the sake of the compilers of future
London hand-books), no building has since been
erected on the exact site of Dr. Johnson's house.
We conclude with Mr. Bensley's own words,
which are touching in their simplicity, as well
as from some of the facts they embody: