“It is charged,” said the officer, changing the subject, “that you neglected to fill a good many orders.  How do you explain that?”

“Why, to furnish the shooter and pay the postage cuts down the profits terribly,” was the unique and characteristic reply.

Orders began to arrive in response to the circular nearly five months before the first shooter came from the hands of the manufacturer; and as none of them were ever filled, or even recorded, it is impossible to estimate how many dupes long watched the mails in anxious expectancy, and perhaps attributed their disappointment to dishonesty among the employees of the department.

Of course the papers which printed the advertisement would have spurned the impostor and exposed the fraud, had they discovered the facts.  The most scrupulous and careful publishers are often deceived in the character of advertisements that come through the regular channels of business, and appear plausible on their face.  In fact, the religious journals are the favorite vehicles of the swindlers.  The solicitude felt by the newspapers, not only for their own reputation, but for the interests of their patrons, was illustrated in the correspondence found on the person of Wilcox.  An influential western journal had addressed him two notes which ran thus:—­

Gents:  We receive frequent letters from subscribers, saying they receive no answers to letters they send you containing money for ‘7-Shooters.’  How is it?  Are you swindlers?”

Wilcox, though fully able to answer the conundrum, did not see fit to do so; and hence, on the 3d of November, the same parties deployed their forces to renew the charge.

“—­, Nov. 3, 1875.

“Wilcox & co.: 

“We have written you once before, that our patrons complain to us that you do not fill their cash orders, and will not answer their letters of inquiry as to why you don’t.  We have received so many such that we suspect there is something wrong, and, unless you explain satisfactorily, we will have to expose you.”

As the special agent arrived on the same day with the inquiry, the young man had no opportunity to make the desired explanation.  Indeed it is doubtful if one so modest and reticent on matters of personal merit, would have answered the question even if permitted to take all winter to do it in.

The United States commissioner, while fully recognizing the ingenuity of the circular, differed somewhat from its author in interpreting its legal construction, and accordingly placed him under a bond of fifteen hundred dollars to appear for trial.

Andrew Lang

Saint-Germain the Deathless

Among the best brief masterpieces of fiction are Lytton’s The Haunters and the Haunted, and Thackeray’s Notch on the Axe in Roundabout Papers.* Both deal with a mysterious being who passes through the ages, rich, powerful, always behind the scenes, coming no man knows whence, and dying, or pretending to die, obscurely—­ you never find authentic evidence of his disease.  In other later times, at other courts, such an one reappears and runs the same course of luxury, marvel, and hidden potency.