woe to the saleswoman who failed to effect a sale, more especially if that saleswoman happened to be unfortunate for two or three times in succession! My friend, after her sad experience of customers' ways, vowed ever to make it a point of religion to spend no more than ten minutes in the choosing of a hat, _and always to end by buying it_. Nevertheless, so far as the big, well-managed shops are concerned, the employés are not really deserving of pity; they have good food and lodging, with comparatively short hours, and the situations they fill are, as a rule, much sought after. It is, rather, the owners of the smaller establishments, in the poorer districts, who "sweat" their unfortunate shop-girls. Here the poor white slaves are often kept hard at work from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., and on Saturday nights till 12, with short intervals for hurried and indifferent meals. Of course, it is the working classes themselves who are the cause of this "sweating"; these do their shopping late, on Saturday nights especially late; and shops, if they closed early in poor districts, would for this reason lose the greater part of their custom. The shop-girl in a really good West End establishment is in very different case. She is often more or less gently bred, such breeding being an important factor in her engagement. Very often, indeed, her superior manners contrast, oddly enough, with the rudeness of the "lady" whom she happens to be serving. Shop-girls and shop-men are always popular elements of London life. There was, quite lately, a comic opera written in the shop-girl's honour. And, so far as shop-men are concerned, it is an eloquent fact that in the recent revival of the Gilbert-and-Sullivan opera _Patience_, the only noteworthy alterations in the text were the substitution of the "Twopenny Tube young man" for the "Threepenny 'Bus young man," and of the words "Tottenham House" for the departed "Waterloo House." For a London audience must, above all things, be kept up to date, and a small anachronism of the latter kind, a mistake about the shops, would be noticed by them much sooner than a more important one.