say, or will say, wore, wear, or
will wear, thought, think, or will think, ate, eat, or will eat, drank,
drink, or will drink: and if there be any other verb coming under the head
of "to do, to be, to suffer," add that to the list, and the old-clothes
monger will furnish you with something to fill out the phrase.

These are they who patch out their miserable, little, sham "properties"
for mock representations of life, by scraps from private letters, bits of
conversation overheard on piazzas, in parlors, in bedrooms, by odds and
ends of untrustworthy statements picked up at railway-stations,
church-doors, and offices of all sorts, by impudent inferences and
suppositions, and guesses about other people's affairs, by garblings and
partial quotings, and, if need be, by wholesale lyings.

The trade is on the increase,--rapidly, fearfully on the increase. Every
large city, every summer watering-place, is more or less infested with
this class of dealers. The goods they have to furnish are more and more in
demand. There is hardly a journal in the country but has column after
column full of their tattered wares; there is hardly a man or woman in the
country but buys them.

There is, perhaps, no remedy. Human nature has not yet shed all the
monkey. A lingering and grovelling baseness in the average heart delights
in this sort of cast-off clothes of fellow-worms. But if the trade must
continue, can we not insist that the profits be shared? If A is to receive
ten dollars for quoting B's remarks at a private dinner yesterday, shall
not B have a small percentage on the sale? Clearly, this is only justice.
And in cases where the wares are simply stolen, shall there be no redress?
Here is an opening for a new Bureau. How well its advertisements would
read:--

"Ladies and gentlemen wishing to dispose of their old opinions,
sentiments, feelings, and so forth, and also of the more interesting facts
in their personal history, can obtain good prices for the same at No.--
Tittle-tattle street. Inquire at the door marked 'Regular and Special
Correspondence.'

"N. B.--Persons willing to be reported _verbatim_ will receive especial
consideration."

We commend this brief suggestion of a new business to all who are anxious
to make a living and not particular how they make it. Perhaps the class of
whom we have been speaking would find it profitable to set it up as a
branch of their own calling. It is quite possible that nobody else in the
c