If you decline to purchase a frame, and write telling him to return your photograph, you receive no reply to your letter, and finally, to recover the photograph which you value, you send the money for the frame, and receive a fairly good crayon enlargement of your photograph in a frame which has cost you as many guineas as it is worth shillings. There is a class of advertisement which may be seen in almost any weekly paper which just borders on the fraudulent. Even if they are genuine in themselves—and some undoubtedly are not—they open the door to fraud. I refer to those advertisements offering articles for sale in connection with monetary prizes to every purchaser and winner in a competition which can be guessed at a glance. Every purchaser is told in the advertisement that he will be entitled to receive a prize of £10 if he guesses rightly; but when he has made his purchase and sent in his solution, he will find that either only the first letter opened gets the prize, or that every competitor having guessed correctly, he is only entitled to receive a halfpenny for his share of the money. In this last case, of course, the thing is a swindle because no one would have purchased the article and answered the competition if they thought the money was going to be divided amongst the winners. I tried one of these competitions myself, not because I thought it was genuine, but because I wanted to see how it was worked. The task I had to accomplish was something like the following: “Give the names of the fruits and flowers mentioned below—Soer, Reap, Liput, Cepah, Socruc, Ragone.” Well, you can see at a glance they are rose, pear, tulip, peach, crocus, orange. I sent in my answer and a shilling and a penny stamp, and in due course received a puzzle worth about twopence. Later on I received a letter stating that my solution of all the words was correct, and enclosing my share of the prize—a halfpenny stamp. In a similar competition I saw it stated in the papers that 6,000 answers had been received, which shows that the game must be a very paying one for those who issue the advertisements. What a number of young women there must be waiting to get married! In answer to an advertisement which appeared the other day in the _Exchange and Mart_, in which a lady, “disappointed in love, offered her _trousseau_ at an enormous sacrifice,” over 1,400 replies were received. But the lady “disappointed in love” disappointed also the 1,400 ladies who wanted a _trousseau_, for her advertisement was a bogus one, and was merely another trap to catch the unwary. One has to be very sharp, but the sharpest of us are sometimes taken in, including even Your affectionate cousin, BOB BRIEFLESS. GIRLS AS I HAVE KNOWN THEM. BY ELSA D’ESTERRE-KEELING, Author of “Old Maids and Young.” PART VI. THE ATHLETIC GIRL. WANTED: A groom, tall, good-looking, steady. WANTED: A housemaid, neat, respectable, no fringe. WANTED: A cook, good, plain.