What could be better than this? Here is a man with some money bearing three per cent., and here is a proposition to give him twenty per cent. There are "Honorables," and "Sirs," and "Esquires" on the board, and Mr. Atwood, F. R. S., and all the rest of it, shows that twenty per cent. has been made in Venezuela. Why should not the man convert some of his beggarly three per cents. into cash and take a shy at it, as Wall street would say, and set up his carriage on the profits? True, he don't know one of the Sirs or Honorables, and Atwood, F. R. S., etc., is quite as unknown to him. But then the advertisements! They cover half a page in each paper in London, and that costs an immense sum, and were there not something in it how could they make that vast expenditure? He takes it, never dreaming that the speculators who pay for these advertisements, do it for the purpose of catching just such gudgeons as he is, knowing, for they know human nature, that the modest announcements that are made for really solid investments, would not catch him at all. There are projected companies for supplying London with fish, all with boards of directors, and all promising from ten to twenty per cent. profit, not one of them with less than two million five hundred thousand dollars capital, in shares of five dollars each. Now there is no city in the world so well supplied with fish as London, in fact the supply is far beyond the demand, and there is no city which has cheaper sea food. There being innumerable private firms in the business, and there being fish markets everywhere, it would be supposed that a man of fair intelligence would question the possibility of any new company being able to compete in the business profitably. But, as in the mining companies, the array of names, and the deliciously worded prospectus, are hooks that never fail to catch. It is not the fish in the sea that these fellows are after. These are only specimen bricks. There are companies for the development of iron mines, of tin mines, of copper mines, and all other kinds of mines in England, Spain, Algeria, India, and everywhere under the sun, companies proposing to buy vast tracts of land in Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Colorado, New Mexico, and everywhere else, each with its board of noblemen, its bankers and solicitors.