Another curiosity of the advertisement literature of the seventeenth century is the number of servants and apprentices absconding with their masters’ property. Nearly all those dishonest servants must have had appearances such as in these days might lead to conviction first and trial afterwards. First of all, there is scarcely one of them but is “pock-marked,” “pock-pitted,” “pock-fretted,” “pock-holed,” “pit-marked,” or “full of pock-holes,” a fact which furnishes a significant index of the ravages this terrible sickness must have made amongst our ancestors, and offers a conclusive argument--though argument is unfortunately inadmissible among them--to those blatant and illogical people, the opponents of vaccination. Besides the myriads who annually died of small-pox, it would, perhaps, not be an exaggeration to assume that one-fourth of mankind at that time was pock-marked, and not pock-marked as we understand the term. Whole features were destroyed, and a great percentage of blindness was attributable to this cause. Indeed, so accustomed were the people of those times to pock-marked faces, that these familiar inequalities of the facial surface do not appear to have been considered an absolute drawback even upon the charms of a beauty or a beau. Louis XIV. in his younger days was considered one of the handsomest men of France, notwithstanding that he was pock-marked, and La Vallière and some other famous beauties of that period are known to have laboured under the same disadvantage. This is a hard fact which should destroy many of the ideas raised by fiction. The following is a fair specimen of the descriptions of the dangerous classes given in the early part of the latter half of the seventeenth century, and is taken from the _Mercurius Politicus_ of May 1658:--