MY DEAR DOROTHY,--Before going away for your summer holiday, I should advise you to put all your valuables, such as your silver tea-set, etc., into a strong iron box and get Gerald to deposit the same at his bank, where it will be perfectly safe. The bank will not give you a receipt for the contents of the box, because they will not make themselves responsible for property which they are taking care of gratuitously; but they will give you an acknowledgment for the box itself, which is quite sufficient for your purpose. The landlady at Southsea had no justification for writing and telling you that you could not have the rooms, which you had previously engaged, for another week yet, because her present lodgers were staying on in them. She has broken her contract with you--which was to let her rooms to you from a certain date for a specified amount--so that if you find it more convenient to leave town at the date you originally fixed, you need not wait upon the Southsea landlady's pleasure. The contract to take her rooms is at an end, and you need not go to her at all unless it suits you to do so. From a strictly legal point of view, you have a right of action against her, which I do not advise nor suppose you would care to exercise, although it is most annoying to have your plans upset in this manner, and more especially too when you went to the trouble and expense of going down to Southsea so as to make certain of securing comfortable quarters. I would not advise your friend to have anything to do with those attractive advertisements which appear in the newspapers, offering home employment to gentlewomen at the rate of ten to thirty shillings a week. The dodge is little better than a swindle; perhaps not a swindle in a strictly legal sense, but a swindle all the same. The way it is worked is this: you are asked to send two or three shillings in the first instance and in return you get a quantity of rubber stamps which you have to sell to your friends at a profit, and when you have disposed of them all (a most unlikely event) you buy more rubber stamps at wholesale prices and sell them at retail ones; or else you receive a packet of wool, which you have to knit into an impossible number of socks and comforters, and for which you will be paid a small sum for so many dozen pairs. It is a particularly heartless swindle to my mind, because the unfortunate ladies who answer these advertisements can ill afford to waste even two or three shillings, and, of course, they are quite unable to sell the rubber stamps or similar rubbish received in return for their money. I have received frequent complaints from ladies who have been taken in by this trick, and I should like to see all such advertisements expunged from the newspapers. The advertisement columns contain a good many traps for the unwary. For instance, there is the “lady” who is offering silver fish-knives for sale at an immense sacrifice, unused, and less than half the original value.