The next exhibit will be a letter from a famous author, a complete stranger to me, whose work I had long known and admired: "Dear Madam, For a long time past it has been my privilege to express in the daily newspapers my keen and heartfelt appreciation of a certain departmental store. I thought that I knew my work. I believe even that it gave satisfaction. I could begin an article with fragments of moral philosophy, easily intelligible and certain of general acceptance, modulate with consummate skill into the key of _crêpe de chine_, and with a further natural and easy transition reach the grand theme of the glorious opportunities offered by a philanthropical Oxford Street to a gasping and excited public. Or I would adopt with grace and facility the attitude of a prejudiced and hostile critic, show how cold facts and indisputable figures reversed my judgment, and end with a life-like picture of myself heading frantically in a No. 16 'bus for the bargain basement, haunted by the terror that I might be too late. With what dignity--even majesty--did I not invest an ordinary transaction in _lingerie_, when I spoke of 'the policy of this great House'! Yes, I believed I knew what there was to know of the supreme art of writing an advertisement. "But now the mists roll away and I see as it were remote peaks of delicate and implicating advertising the existence of which I had never suspected. It is to you I owe it. You have a theme that you probably find inexhaustible. Fired by your example I shall turn to my own subject (Government linen at the moment) with a happy consciousness that I shall do a far, far better thing than I have ever done before. "Your obedient servant, "CALLISTHENIDES." Of this letter I will only say that few have the courage and candour to acknowledge an inferiority and an indebtedness, and fewer still could have done it in the vicious and even succulent style of the above. It is a letter that I read often and value highly. The only trouble about it is that I sometimes wonder if it was not really intended for another lady whose name has one or two points of similarity with my own. I cannot refrain from quoting also one of the many letters that I received from my dear old friend, Mr. J. A. Bunting: