carries about his placards in a four-wheeled waggon, and that his paste-pot is a huge cauldron!  How he contrives to paste and stick such an enormous sheet so neatly against the rugged side of a house, is really astonishing.  Whether three or four stories high, the same precision is remarkable.  We cannot but wonder at the dexterity of his practised hand:  The union is as perfect as if Dan Hymen, the saffron-robed Joiner, had personally superintended the performance.

The wind is perhaps the only real enemy he has to fear.  How his heart and his flimsy paper must flutter in the unruly gusts of a March wind!  We only imagine him pasting up a “Sale of Horses,” in a retired nook, and seeing his bill carried away on an eddy!

We once had the good fortune to witness a gusty freak of this kind.  The bill-sticker had affixed a bill upon the hooks of his stick, displaying in prominent large characters—­“Sale by auction—­Mr. GEO. Robins—­Capital Investment,”—­and so forth, when a sudden whirlwind took the bill off the hooks, before it was stuck, and fairly enveloped the countenance of a dandy gentleman who happened at the moment to be turning the corner.

Such a “Capital Investment” was certainly ludicrous in the extreme.

The poor bill-sticker was rather alarmed, for he had never stuck a bill before on any front that was occupied.

He peeled the gentleman as quickly as possible, and stammered out an apology.  The sufferer, however, swore he would prefer a bill against him at the ensuing sessions.  Whether his threat was carried into execution, or he was satisfied with the damages already received, we know not.

OLD FOOZLE.

There is a certain period of life beyond which the plastic mind of man becomes incapable of acquiring any new impressions.  He merely elaborates and displays the stores he has garnered up in his youth.  There are indeed some rare exceptions to the rule; but few, very few, can learn a language after the age of forty.  ’Tis true that Cowper did not commence the composition of his delightful poems till he had attained that age; but then it must be remembered that he had previously passed a life of study and preparation, and that he merely gave the honey to the world which he had hived in his youth, bringing to the task a mind polished and matured by judgment and experience.  But, generally speaking, we rather expect reason than rhyme from an elderly gentleman; and when the reverse is the case, the pursuit fits them as ridiculously as would a humming-top or a hoop.  Yet there are many who, having passed a life in the sole occupation of making money—­the most unpoetical of all avocations—­that in their retirement entertain themselves with such fantastic pranks and antics, as only serve to amuse the lookers-on.  A retired tradesman, it is true, may chase ennui and the ‘taedium vitae,’