Page:All the Year Round - Series 2 - Volume 1.djvu/44

 handles, disabled locks, bunches of obsolete keys, superseded door knockers, ancient jam pots, broken china figures, plaster casts without noses, empty ink jars, medicine bottles half full of mixture which was to be taken three times a day and wasn't, worn-out toothbrush handles, knobs that have come off everything that could have a knob, handles of everything that could have a handle—handles of parasols, of button hooks, of butter knives, of paper knives, of water jugs, of tea pots. There are, besides such mere rubbish and refuse, certain objects which belong to most people, which are of some—occasionally of great—intrinsic value, but which we don't in the slightest degree appreciate, and secretly yearn to be delivered from. There is the pair of vases for the chimneypiece, which were given you on your marriage day, and which, entirely destroying the effect of your drawing-room, you have banished to a bedroom, where they are bitterly in the way. There is the set of dining-room chairs, bought by yourself, with your eyes open, when you paid away hard money—and a good deal of it—in order that you might become possessed of what you detest from the bottom of your soul. There is that claret-coloured surtout, which will not answer at all, and which is not likely to wear out, because you never put it on; also, the pair of unmentionables, the material of which, when they were brought home, turned out to be so much more violent in colour than it looked in the tailor's pattern-book. What are you to do with such things as these? You cannot burn a whole set of dining-room chairs, or a claret-coloured surtout; and you don't like the idea of selling them, because, if it got about, your friends would at once come to the conclusion that you were on the eve of bankruptcy, and so your social position might suffer. What are you to do?

What you are to do is simply this: You are to advertise in a journal called The Exchange and Mart. You are to advertise that you are willing to barter these objects which are harassing the life out of you, for certain other objects, which you specify, and which are equally harrowing to their present proprietor.

The Exchange and Mart is a weekly periodical, which has been in existence something over six months. The object with which this journal has been started may be best explained by a quotation from the first page of the work itself:

It will be seen here that not only do the originators of this scheme take the interests of their clients very much to heart, but that great consideration for their feelings is also exhibited, and ample provision made for that tendency to shrink from observation which ever besets the amateur seller, and which we see provided against by the pawnbroking fraternity in the shape of those private doors round the corner, always inseparable from such of their establishments as are found in our genteeler neighbourhoods.

Some plain directions to intending advertisers follow:

That last "guarantee" is a bold one, and shows that the proprietors of the undertaking regard the class which is ready to fly to ills it knows not of, rather than to endure those which it has, as rather a large one. And, indeed, judging from the advertisements which fill more than a dozen large columns of this wonderful journal, it would seem to be so. It is pathetic to observe how—the means of making their miseries known having at length come in their way—the proprietors of all sorts of detested objects hurry forward in search of deliverance from their passive tormentors. The present writer once went to see the "Home for Lost and Starving Dogs;" and as soon as he appeared in the yard, every one of those poor ownerless wretches rushed headlong to the bars behind which they were confined, each imagining that his especial proprietor had at last turned up. So with these advertisers. They were pining hopeless among those fatal possessions, when suddenly the proprietors of The Exchange and Mart appeared on the scene with signals of deliverance; and instantly the advertisers flung themselves at their feet, frantic with gratitude and hope. "Rescue me from this concertina, which I can't play!" cries one. "Deliver me from this statuette, the sight of which is killing me by inches!" shrieks another. "This gun," groans a third, "with