Having got through with making contracts the agent begins to "bill the town." The amount of billing that is done depends largely upon the reputation of the star or attraction, and the manner in which the newspapers have been worked. An actress like Mary Anderson puts out but about one hundred three-sheet bills--a three-sheet bill being the ordinary poster that is seen upon a single bill-board--in any of the large cities. Sarah Bernhardt and Adelina Patti, who were kept before the public by the press for many months before they came to this country, needed but a few three-sheet bills and a simple announcement of their coming in the newspapers. Mrs. Langtry, Christine Nilsson, and Henry Irving will be billed in the same economical way when they reach our shores. Edwin Booth and John McCullough, like Mary Anderson, use only a small quantity of three-sheet bills for advertising on the walls. These people require few lithographs, and are likewise fortunate in not being required to buy large space in the papers. Nearly all the minor melodramatic and comedy attractions take to the circus style of advertising. Charles L. Davis, of "Alvin Joslyn" fame, who wears the largest diamond and carries the finest watch in the profession, boasts that he always likes to bill against a circus. When he was in St. Louis during the season of 1881-2, Mr. W. R. Cottrell, the city bill-poster, told me that Davis put out about four thousand sheets, and everlastingly sprinkled the windows with colored lithographs. Mr. Cottrell also told me that this does not approach the lavishness of circuses in decorating the fences and walls and bill-boards of cities. These latter usually put out not less than ten thousand sheets, and the Great London Show a few seasons ago would spread from eighteen to twenty thousand sheets before the eyes of a city having a population of four hundred thousand. The bill-poster gets three cents per sheet for posting, and $1 per hundred for distributing lithographs, so that, as will be understood, a circus or a theatrical attraction like Charles L. Davis is a bonanza to the bill-poster. From the big type of the bill-boards the advance agent naturally turns his attention to the smaller, but probably more effective, type of the newspaper. He rushes into the editorial rooms like a whirlwind, if he is a cyclonic agent, asks in a voice of thunder for the dramatic critic, and when that gentleman is pointed out, after depositing a gilt-edged card and bestrewing the journalist's desk with a mass of notices from the Oakland _Bugle_, the Bragtown _Boomerang_, and forty other equally important and severely critical journals, proceeds to talk so loudly that he disturbs all the writers in the room, and has the managing editor on the point nineteen times out of twenty of ordering him out of the office.