When two of a trade fall out, they are apt to disclose secrets which it were wiser to keep to themselves. Disgusted by the success of a rival whose advertising boards bore the representation of a venerable man sitting cross-legged at his work, a San Francisco tailor advertised: ‘Don’t be humbugged by hoary-headed patriarchs who picture themselves cross-legged, and advertise pants made to order, three, four, and five dollars a pair. Do you know how it’s done? When you go into one of these stores that cover up their shop-windows with sample lengths of cassimere, marked “Pants to order, three dollars fifty cents and four dollars;” after you have made a selection of the piece of cloth you want your pants made from, the pompous individual who is chief engineer of the big tailor shears, lays them softly on the smoothest part of his cutting-table, unrolls his tape-line, and proceeds to measure his victim all over the body. The several measurements are all carefully entered in a book by the other humbug. The customer is then told that his pants will be finished in about twenty-four or thirty-six hours; all depends upon how long it takes to shrink the cloth. That’s the end of the first act. Part second.—The customer no sooner leaves the store than the merchant-tailor calls his shopboy Jim, and sends him around to some wholesale jobber, and says: “Get me a pair of pants, pattern thirty-six,” which is the shoddy imitation of the piece of cassimere that your pants are to be made of. “Get thirty-four round the waist, and thirty-three in the leg.” They are pulled out of a pile of a hundred pairs just like them, made by Chinese cheap labour. All the carefully made measurements and other claptrap are the bait on the hook. That’s the way it’s done.’ Traders sometimes give themselves away, as Americans say, innocently enough, a Paris grocer advertising Madeira at two francs, Old Madeira at three francs, and genuine Madeira at ten francs, a bottle. A Bordeaux wine-merchant, after stating the price per cask and bottle of ‘the most varied and superior growths of Bordeaux and Burgundy,’ concludes by announcing that he has also a stock of natural wine to be sold by private treaty. A sacrificing draper funnily tempts ladies to rid him of three hundred baptiste robes by averring ‘they will not last over two days;’ and the proprietor of somebody’s Methuselah Pills can give them no higher praise than, ‘Thousands have taken them, and are living still.’