Page:All the Year Round - Series 1 - Volume 1.djvu/16

8[April 30, 1859.] Houses of small size and ladies of all sizes employ the Fabric. What returns pour in? Look at the population of houses and ladies, and say Seventy Millions Sterling per annum. Add foreign houses and foreign ladies, under the head of Exports, and say Thirty Millions per annum more. Is this too much for the ordinary mind to embrace? It is very good. The patentee is perfectly willing to descend the scale at a jump; to address the narrowest comprehension; and to knock off nine-tenths. Remainder, Ten Millions. Say that "the royalty" will be thirty per cent., and "such profit would give three millions of pounds sterling to be divided among the shareholders." Simple, as the simplest sum in the Multiplication Table: simple as two and two make four.

I am aware that the obstinate incredulity of the age will inquire why the fortunate Patentee does not keep these prodigious returns to himself. How base is Suspicion! How easily, in this instance, is it answered and rebuked! The Patentee refrains from keeping the returns to himself, because he doesn't want money. His lithographed circular informs me—really and truly does inform me, and will inform you if you have to do with him—that he has had "a good fortune" left him, and that he is "heir to several thousand pounds a year." With these means at his disposal, he might of course work his inestimable patent with his own resources. But no!—he will let the public in. What a man! How noble his handwriting must be, in a graphiological point of view! What phrases are grateful enough to acknowledge his personal kindness in issuing shares to me at "the totally-inadequate sum"—to use his own modest words—of five shillings each? Happy, happy day, when I and the Fabric and the Patentee were all three introduced to one another!

When a man is so fortunate as to know himself, from the height of his "volatile liveliness" to the depth of his "melancholy tenderness"—as I know myself—when, elevated on a multiform Fabric, he looks down from the regions of perpetual wealth on the narrow necessities of the work-a-day world beneath him—but one other action is left for that man to perform, if he wishes to make the sum of his earthly felicity complete. The ladies will already have anticipated that the action which I now refer to as final may be comprehended in one word—Marriage.

The course of all disbelievers in advertisements, where they are brought face to face with this grand emergency, is more or less tortuous, troubled, lengthy, and uncertain. No man of this unhappy stamp can fall in love, bill and coo, and finally get himself married, without a considerable amount of doubt, vexation, and disappointment occurring at one period or other in the general transaction of his amatory affairs. Through want of faith and postage stamps, mankind have agreed to recognise these very disagreeable drawbacks as so many inevitable misfortunes: dozens of popular proverbs assert their necessary existence, and nine-tenths of our successful novels are filled with the sympathetic recital of them in successions of hysterical chapters. And yet, singular as it may appear, the most cursory reference to the advertising columns of the newspapers is sufficient to show the fallacy of this view, if readers would only exercise (as I do) their faculties of implicit belief. As there are infallible secrets for discovering character by handwriting, and making fortunes by Fabrics, so there are other infallible secrets for falling in love with the right woman, fascinating her in the right way, and proposing to her at the right time, which render doubt, disappointment, or hesitation, at any period of the business, so many absolute impossibilities. Once again, let me confute incredulous humanity, by quoting my own happy experience.

Now, mark. I think it desirable to settle in life. Good. Do I range over my whole acquaintance; do I frequent balls, concerts, and public promenades; do I spend long days in wearisome country-houses, and sun myself persistently at the watering-places of England—all for the purpose of finding a woman to marry? I am too wise to give myself any such absurd amount of trouble. I simply start my preliminary operations by answering the following advertisement:

When the answer reaches me, I find Mr. Flam—although undoubtedly a benefactor to mankind—to be scarcely so ready of access and so expansive in his nature as the Proprietor of the Fabric. Instead of sending me the Secret, he transmits a printed paper, informing me that he wants two shillings worth of postage stamps first. To my mind, it seems strange that he should have omitted to mention this in the Advertisement. But I send the stamps, nevertheless; and get the Secret back from Mr. Flam, in the form of a printed paper. Half of this paper is addressed to the fair sex, and is therefore, I fear, of no use to me. The other half, however, addresses the lords of the creation; and I find the Secret summed up at the end, for their benefit, in these few but most remarkable words:

Most astonishing! All great discoveries are simple. Is it not amazing that nobody should have had the smallest suspicion of the sublime truth expressed above, until Mr. Flam suddenly hit on it? How cheap, too—how scandalously cheap at two shillings! And this is the man