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 and disclosing them to their right owners, exacting his fee before he made his communication. He then generalized into trying to get fees from all of the name belonging to a dividend; and he gave mysterious hints of danger impending. For instance, he would write to a clergyman that a legal penalty was hanging over him; and when the alarmed divine forwarded the sum required for disclosure, he was favoured with an extract from some old statute or canon, never repealed, forbidding a clergyman to be a member of a corporation, and was reminded that he had insured his life in the Office, which had a royal charter. He was facetious, was Joseph: he described himself in his circulars as 'personally known to Sir Peter Laurie and all other aldermen'; which was nearly true, as he had been before most of them on charges of false pretence; but I believe he was nearly always within the law. Sir James Duke, when Lord Mayor, having particularly displeased him by a decision, his circulars of 1849 contain the following:—

I strongly suspect that Joseph Ady believed in himself.

He sometimes issued a second warning, of a Sibylline character:—

Lieut. Morrison is Zadkiel Tao Sze, and declares himself in real earnest an astrologer. There are a great many books on