Some idea of the amount of business which is done in advertising may be obtained from the fact that in 1877-78, one of the dull years, twenty-four thousand two hundred and ninety advertisements were received in the WITNESS office, a daily average of seventy-nine. This was obtained almost without any canvassing. A business that depends largely on canvassing must necessarily adopt prices that will cover canvassers' commission. [Illustration: ANSWERING AN ADVERTISEMENT.] There are many traditions in the WITNESS office in regard to remarkable answers to advertisements. A gentleman, one bright summer's day, lost a favorite canary, and hurried to the WITNESS office to make his loss known. His advertisement was immediately sent up to the compositors' room to be set up, and while this was being done the bird flew in through the window and perched himself on the case immediately in front of the young man who was putting the advertisement into type. Birdie was caught, and soon the owner was happy again. It is well that all lost articles do not, in a similar manner, find their way into printing offices, as the character of the profession might then be subject to suspicion. The subject of curious advertisements is an endless one, and has been fully entered into in Sampson's "History of Advertising." There is the kind in which the sentences are, to say the least, ambiguous, as that of the lady who advertised for a husband "with a Roman nose having strong religious tendencies." Then there was "to be sold cheap, a splendid gray horse, calculated for a charger, or would carry a lady with a switch tail,"--hardly as curious an individual as the one spoken of in the following announcement: "To be sold cheap, a mail phaeton, the property of a gentleman with a movable head as good as new." A travelling companion to these would be the following: "To be sold an Erard grand piano, the property of a lady, about to travel in a walnut wood case with carved legs." But what can compare with the specimen of humanity referred to by a chemist in the request that "the gentleman who left his stomach for analysis will please call and get it, together with the result!" The insertion of marriages is of early date, they first appearing as news, and in certain respects were much more satisfactory than those now given, as for instance, the one in the _Daily Post Boy_ of February 21st, 1774: "_Married_, yesterday at St. James' church, by the Right Rev. Dr. Hen. Egerton, Lord Bishop of Hereford, the Hon. Francis Godolphin, Esq., of Scotland Yard, to the third daughter of the Countess of Portland, a beautiful lady of £50,000 fortune." Sometimes the papers in those days disputed as to the matters of marriages and deaths. The _London Evening Post_, in April, 1734, said: "_Married._--A few days since--Price, a Buckinghamshire gentleman of near £2,000 per annum, to Miss Robinson, of the Theatre Royal, Drury-lane."