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Up and down Rutland Street had Walter Joyce paced full a thousand times since his arrival in London. The name of the street and of its principal inhabitants was familiar to him through the advertisements in the clerical newspaper which used to be sent to Mr. Ashurst at Helmingham; and no sooner was he settled down in his little lodging in Winchester Street than he crossed the mighty artery of the Strand, and sought out the street and the shops of which he had already heard so much. He saw them, peered in at Copes', and at Tubelkahn's, and looked earnestly at Camoxons' ground-glass window, and half thought of going in to see whether they had anything which might suit him on their books. But he refrained until he had received the answers to a certain advertisement which he had inserted in the newspaper, setting forth that a young man with excellent testimonials--he knew he could get them from the rector of Helmingham--was desirous of giving instruction in the classics and mathematics. Advertising, he thought, was a better and more gentlemanly medium than causing a detailed list of his accomplishments to be inscribed in the books of the Ecclesiastical Registry, as a horse's pedigree and performances are entered in the horsedealer's list; but when, after hunting for half an hour through the columns of the newspaper's supplement, he found his advertisement amongst a score of others, all of them from men with college honours, or promising greater advantages than he could hold forth, he began to doubt the wisdom of his proceeding. However, he would wait and see the result. He did so wait for three days, but not a single line addressed, as requested, to W.J. found its way to Winchester Street. Then he sent for the newspaper again, and began to reply to the advertisements which he thought might suit him. He had no high thoughts or hopes, no notions of regenerating the living generation, or of placing tuition on a new footing, or rendering it easy by some hitherto unexplained process. He had been an usher in a school; for the place of an usher in a school he had advertised; and if he could have obtained that position he would have been contented. But when the few answers to his advertisement arrived, he saw that it was impossible to accept any of the offers they contained. One man wanted him to teach French with a guaranteed Parisian accent, to devote his whole time out of school-hours to the boys, to supervise them in the Indian-sceptre athletic exercises, and to rule over a dormitory of thirteen, "where, in consequence of the lax supervision of the last didaskolos, severe measures would be required," for twenty pounds a year. Another gentleman, whose notepaper was ornamented with a highly florid Maltese cross, and who dated his letter "Eve of S. Boanerges," wished to know his opinion of the impostor-firebrand M. Luther, and whether he (the advertiser) had any connections in the florist or decorative line, with whom an arrangement in the mutual-accommodation way could be entered into; while a third, evidently a grave sententious man, with a keen eye to business, expressed, on old-fashioned Bath-post, gilt-edged letter-paper, his desire to know "what sum W.J. would be willing to contribute for the permission to state, after a year's residence, that he had been one of Dr. Sumph's most trusted helpmates and assistants."