The suggestion to copy the tombstone could not have been evolved from any mind but that of the late Charles Howard. The other is from a confiding person who writes--Howard has evidently asked for a commission--"I am willing to have ten per cent. _reducted_," and the bad-spelling simpleton plaintively adds: "_Please to get the thing through as soon as possible_." [Illustration: ADDRESS BOOKS, MEMORANDA, ETC., OF A PROFESSIONAL BEGGING-LETTER WRITER.] Your true begging-letter writer is certainly entitled to join the family circle of forgers, though in most cases only as a distant cousin. What a begging-letter writer Howard would have made! But there are men and women whose talents in this peculiar art are just as fine if not so varied. It is only when a man attains to position that he becomes aware of what a number of boys used to play marbles with him at school. Your begging-letter writer at once marks him for his own, he has "got him on the list." It would be quite impossible, in a short paper such as this, to place on record anything more than a few of the methods of your modern begging-letter writer; of the old soldier who sends a line to some Army man at his club; of the ardent but hard-up politician who addresses some M.P.; of the real truth regarding that hurriedly pencilled note addressed to the City merchant and stating that "years ago" the applicant was once "on the market himself," etc., and would you oblige with five shillings, "which I faithfully promise, dear sir, to pay you back in a fortnight's time." Have you ever met the good woman--perhaps you have heard from her--who is a widow with two children, her husband is lying dangerously ill at home, and she wants a few shillings to purchase necessaries. As a proof of her honesty she incloses the receipt for her last month's rent. A certain society can show you a bundle of some forty of these letters, and every one of them contains a receipt for that same month's rent. The common lodging-house is the _depôt_ for every fraud under the sun, and there are scores of men who frequent them who will write you the most touching appeal for threepence or fourpence, and find the note-paper into the bargain. [Illustration: A PROFESSIONAL BEGGING-LETTER WRITER--SPECIMEN OF MEMORANDUM.]