with posting. Yet, in the days of which we have just been speaking, the man of paste considered himself a very important personage; and it is not so very long since one individual published himself under the style and title of “Champion Billposter,” and as such defied all comers. It was for some time doubtful whether his claims depended upon his ability to beat and thrash all rivals at fisticuffs, whether he was able to stick more bills in a given time than any other man, or whether he had a larger and more important connection than usually fell to the poster’s lot; in fact, the question has never been settled, for exception having been taken to his assumption of the title of champion from any point of view, and reference having been made to the editors of sporting papers, the ambitious one gracefully withdrew his pretensions, and the matter subsided. A generation ago one of the most popular songs of the day commenced something like this-- “I’m Sammy Slap the billsticker, and you must all agree, sirs, I sticks to business like a trump while business sticks to me, sirs. There’s some folks calls me plasterer, but they deserve a banging, Cause yer see, genteelly speaking, that my trade is paperhanging. With my paste, paste, paste! All the world is puffing, So I’ll paste, paste, paste!” [Illustration: AN OLD BILL-STATION.] The advent of advertisement contractors, who purchased the right, exclusive and absolute, to stick bills on a hoarding, considerably narrowed the avocations of what might almost have been called the predatory billsticker. For a long time the fight was fierce and often; as soon as an “advertisement station” had been finished off, its bills and announcements being all regulated with mathematical precision, a cloud of skirmishers, armed to the teeth with bills, pots, and brushes, would convert, in a few minutes, the orderly arrangements of the contractor to a perfect chaos. But time, which rights all things, aided in the present instance by a few magisterial decisions, and by an unlooked-for and unaccountable alacrity on the part of the police, set these matters straight; and now it is hard to find an enclosure in London the hoarding of which is not notified as being the “advertisement station” of some contractor or other who would blush to be called billsticker. In the suburbs the flying brigade is still to be found hard at work, but daily its campaigning ground becomes more limited, and gradually these Bashi-Bazouks of billsticking are becoming absorbed into the regular ranks of the agents’ standing corps.