re are thousands of women offering these
manuscripts. The publishers and the editors walk slowly along before
the stalls and receive the manuscripts, which they look at and then
lay down, though their writers weep and wail and wring their hands.
Presently there comes along a man greatly resembling in the expression
of his face the wild and savage wolf trying to smile. His habit is to
take up a manuscript, and presently to express, with the aid of
strange oaths and ejaculations, wonder and imagination. ''Fore Gad,
madam!' he says, ''tis fine! 'Twill take the town by storm! 'Tis an
immortal piece! Your own, madam? Truly 'tis wonderful! Nay, madam, but
I must have it. 'Twill cost you for the printing of it a paltry sixty
pounds or so, and for return, believe me, 'twill prove a new Potosi.'
This is the confidence trick under another form. The unfortunate woman
begs and borrows the money, of which she will never again see one
farthing; and if her book be produced, no one will ever buy a copy.

The women at these stalls are always changing. They grow tired of
waiting when no one will buy: they go away. A few may be traced. They
become type-writers: they become cashiers in shops; they sit in the
outer office of photographers and receive the visitors: they 'devil'
for literary men: they make extracts: they conduct researches and look
up authorities: they address envelopes; some, I suppose, go home again
and contrive to live somehow with their relations. What becomes of the
rest no man can tell. Only when men get together and talk of these
things it is whispered that there is no family, however prosperous,
but has its unsuccessful members--no House, however great, which has
not its hangers-on and followers, like the _ribauderie_ of an army,
helpless and penniless.

Considering, therefore, the miseries, drudgeries, insults, and
humiliations which await the necessitous gentlewoman in her quest for
work and a living, and the fact that these ladies are increasing in
number, and likely to increase, I venture to call attention to certain
preventive steps which may be applied--not for those who are now in
this hell, but for those innocent children whose lot it may be to join
the hapless band. The subject concerns all of us who have to work, all
who have to provide for our families; it concerns every woman who has
daughters: it concerns the girls themselves to such a degree that, if
they knew or suspected the dangers before them they w