The Washington Bee

ADVERTISING FOR A POSITION.

Once I advertised myself as seeking the place of governess to children or companion to a lady. There was no possible invitation to intrigue in the form of my advertisement, although I never dreamed of avoiding such appearance, never even remembered that a great city is full of harpies snuffing for corruption and scenting it everywhere. Among the perfectly honorable and business-like answers to my advertisement, one or two came that made my very hair stand on end. One invited me, in covertly insulting language, to come and care for his children while his wife was in Europe—if I was under twenty-one! A second one was so appalling that I never read it through, and shudder to this day that I ever read so much.

None of my business-like answers ever came to anything save one. A gentlemanly person called upon me at Murray Hill. He was very talkative and agreeable, chatted of theatres, churches, popular preachers, Greenwood Cemetery, ocean-steamers, summer-resorts, and new novels. There was nothing to startle me in the visit, although I wandered continually why he did not approach the real object of the interview. Just as I had made up my mind that he probably was waiting for me to introduce it, he looked at his watch, suddenly started up as if in consternation, saying, "I beg ten thousand pardons, but I had quite forgotten my train. You will allow me to write you upon the subject of your advertisement?" and was gone. A few days after, I received a letter from him, far away in Illinois. He wrote that he had intended to have "some fun" during his late visit to New York, and had answered "heaps" of advertisements in pursuit of that intention. "The minute I saw you, however, I saw that 'fun' was not in your line; but I found you so brilliant and charming that I could not get away, although I sat upon pins and needles during every instant of my call. I am a widower, thirty-seven, with two children, an income of—" and thus the letter ran on till it came to the proposal of a correspondence, with a view to marriage!

Of course I never replied to this letter. I afterwards found out from friends in his own city that the man had given me his real name and a truthful account of his circumstances,—with one important exception. Instead of being a widower, he was the divorced husband of two wives, and had narrowly missed State prison as a bigamist.—Experiences of An Adventuress, in July Lippincott's.