It might, under exceptional circumstances, when needlework is ordered, be necessary to deposit a few shillings as a guarantee that the materials sent to you will be duly returned or paid for; but if your writings require a deposit of any kind to get them read or published, the waste-paper basket is the best place for them, however highly you may yourself value them. Literature, after all, is a very open market, and fresh blood is always needed, though it may be a difficult matter to get your first step on the ladder. “Try, and if you don’t succeed, try, try, try again,” is the very best advice, but don’t subscribe to any association which offers even the most tempting terms to publish in any magazine issued by the joint subscriptions of amateur authors. Nor do not be tempted by offers of introductions to publishers for a consideration. Attack the publishers yourself, without any intermediary. No paid one will help you. I was asked to subscribe to something of the kind not long ago, and among the advantages the subscription was to give me was the power to try for the acrostic and other prizes offered by a well-known weekly paper, which was open to everybody. If as much ingenuity were employed in securing honest work as we find in these bogus advertisements, the perpetrators, I think, would be much better off. The addresses change so frequently, applicants are so deluged with printed testimonials, that they are the more easily gulled. Sometimes the advertisers are obliged at last to send something in return for the money. One Everett May, for example, who for eighteenpence undertook to teach how to earn four guineas a week. For a time he would declare that the packet was posted, and must have been lost in transit, but after a long correspondence and constant demands for more money, if very hard pressed, something arrived, as, in one case, a last, a small boot for a child, and a few pieces of leather, from which it would be impossible to make a fellow boot, and a note concluding with, “As soon as we receive from you a specimen equal to pattern we shall be glad to afford you constant employment.” Another advertisement offered to gentlemen in a respectable circle of acquaintance the means of increasing their incomes, and on receipt of thirty stamps advised the purchase of a cwt. of potatoes for 4s., a basket, and 2s. worth of flannel, to have half the quantity of potatoes baked nightly, put them in the basket well wrapped in flannel, sell them at a 1d. each, and so earn £2 a week.