Two years after the above had occurred, my business—I had abandoned the idea of the Civil service—led me one evening along that wondrous thoroughfare the Strand. Proceeding westwards, about midway between the Temple Bar memorial and Charing Cross, I collided somewhat violently with a man immediately in front of me, who had stooped with the evident intention of picking up something off the ground. He turned round sharply and exclaimed: ‘Did you see that?’ at the same time showing me a gold diamond ring, which he stated he had found on the pavement, and on which he had nearly trodden. I will not weary the reader with a verbatim account of the conversation which then ensued. Suffice it for me to say that I had recognised in the man before me the pock-marked and squinting hero of the Euston Road of two years before. In order, however, further to convince myself that my impressions as to this were correct, I, apparently taking interest in what he had found, allowed him to do and say, act for act and word for word, all that he did and said on the first occasion of my meeting him. He tested the diamond by cutting glass; said he was a poor messenger earning a pound a week; was even then on one of his errands; thought that the discovery of such a ring in his possession would excite suspicion; and—— Well, I neither need, nor will I, rewrite the whole of the first portion of this narration, for what now took place was its precise counterpart. I taxed the swindler with having played the same rôle at Euston Station, two years previously. He replied, in the most naïve manner: ‘Ah, then I was in Liverpool.’ But he was, I suspect, somewhat astonished to find out that I knew him. Again did he ask me to drink with him and to part friends. It is almost needless to add, that though I might have done the latter, I certainly did not do the former, he being evidently a swindler. And so we separated for the second time, he disappearing up one of the tributary streets of the Strand, I proceeding about my business. It struck me as being very wonderful that this man, whose profession it doubtless was to entrap people—young and unsuspecting—in the manner I have described, should have on two separate occasions, between which there was an interval of two years, singled out myself as an intended victim to his fraud, since I am but one of tens of thousands of the youth daily to be remarked walking in the London streets. The remarkable blunder of the impostor proves how correct is the well-known proverb, ‘A liar should have a good memory;’ and the facts here narrated may perhaps serve to put others on their guard against the wiles of London street swindlers. OCCASIONAL NOTES. INVESTIGATIONS ON LIGHTS AND LIGHTHOUSES.