BILL-STICKING.

IF I had an enemy whom I hated—which
Heaven forbid!—and if I knew of something
that sat heavy on his conscience, I think I
would introduce that something into a Posting-
Bill, and place a large impression in the
hands of an active sticker. I can scarcely
imagine a more terrible revenge. I should
haunt him, by this means, night and day. I
do not mean to say that I would publish his
secret, in red letters two feet high, for all the
town to read: I would darkly refer to it.
It should be between him, and me, and the
Posting-Bill. Say, for example, that, at a
certain period of his life, my enemy had
surreptitiously possessed himself of a key. I would
then embark my capital in the lock business,
and conduct that business on the advertising
principle. In all my placards and advertise-ments,
I would throw up the line SECRET
KEYS. Thus, if my enemy passed an
uninhabited house, he would see his conscience
glaring down on him from the parapets, and
peeping up at him from the cellars. If he
took a dead wall in his walk, it would be
alive with reproaches. If he sought refuge in
an omnibus, the panels thereof would
become Belshazzar's palace to him. If he took
boat, in a wild endeavour to escape, he would
see the fatal words lurking under the arches
of the bridges over the Thames. If he walked
the streets with downcast eyes, he would
recoil from the very stones of the pavement,
made eloquent by lamp-black lithograph. If
he drove or rode, his way would be blocked
up, by enormous vans, each proclaiming the
same words over and over again from its whole
extent of surface. Until, having gradually
grown thinner and paler, and having at last
totally rejected food, he would miserably
perish, and I should be revenged. This
conclusion I should, no doubt, celebrate by laughing
a hoarse laugh in three syllables, and
folding my arms tight upon my chest agreeably
to most of the examples of glutted
animosity that I have had an opportunity of
observing in connexion with .the Drama—
which, by the bye, as involving a good deal of
noise, appears to me to be occasionally
confounded with the Drummer.

The foregoing reflections presented
themselves to my mind, the other day, as I
contemplated (being newly come to London from
the East Riding of Yorkshire, on a house-
hunting expedition for next May), an old
warehouse which rotting paste and rotting
paper had brought down to the condition of
an old cheese. It would have been impossible
to say, on the most conscientious survey, how
much of its front was brick and mortar, and
how much decaying and decayed plaster. It
was so thickly encrusted with fragments of
bills, that no ship's keel after a long voyage
could be half so foul. All traces of the broken
windows were billed out, the doors were
billed across, the water-spout was billed over.
The building was shored up to prevent its
tumbling into the street; and the very beams
erected against it, were less wood than paste
and paper, they had been so continually posted
and reposted. The forlorn dregs of old posters
so encumbered this wreck, that there was no
hold for new posters, and the stickers had
abandoned the place in despair, except one
enterprising man who had hoisted the last
masquerade to a clear spot near the level of the
stack of chimnies where it waved and drooped
like a shattered flag. Below the rusty cellar-
grating, crumpled remnants of old bills
torn down, rotted away in wasting heaps of
fallen leaves. Here and there, some of
the thick rind of the house had peeled off in
strips, and fluttered heavily down, littering
the street; but, still, below these rents and
gashes, layers of decomposing posters showed
themselves, as if they were interminable. I
thought the building could never even be
pulled down, but in one adhesive heap of
rottenness and poster. As to getting in—I
don't believe that if the Sleeping Beauty and
her Court had been so billed up, the young
Prince could have done it.

Knowing all the posters that were yet
legible, intimately, and pondering on their
ubiquitous nature, I was led into the reflections
with which I began this paper, by
considering what an awful thing it would be, ever
to have wronged—say M. JULLIEN for example
—and to have his avenging name in characters
of fire incessantly before my eyes. Or to have
injured MADAME TUSSAUD, and undergo a
similar retribution. Has any man a self-
reproachful thought associated with pills, or
ointment? What an avenging spirit to that
man is PROFESSOR HOLLOWAY! Have I