charms that do not exist. All
the lavish cheques she draws upon her male neighbor's admiration are
silently dishonored, and in half an hour after the moment they sit down
to table together she is a hopeless bankrupt in his estimation, even
though he may have courtesy and skill enough to conceal the collapse.

As there are few, if any, pleasanter objects than a pretty woman,
gracefully conscious of her beauty, and radiantly fulfilling its
legitimate end, the power of pleasing, so are there few, if any, more
unpleasant objects than a vain woman, ungracefully conscious of
imaginary charms, and secretly disgusting those she strives to attract.
An ugly woman who gives herself the airs of a beauty, or a silly woman
who believes herself a genius, is not a spectacle upon which a man of
healthy imagination and appetite likes to dwell. It is perhaps only in
accordance with the theory that this life is a state of trial and
probation that the tastes can be explained. Happily, it is not very
common. Most women know their strong from their weak points, and marshal
them on the whole well in the encounter with their lawful oppressor and
great enemy, man. And until they have won the victory to which Dr. Mary
Walker is now leading them on, may they never lack the female vanity
which makes it one of their great objects in life to please!

THE ABUSE OF MATCH-MAKING.

It is a pity that when, by some train of ill-luck, a word of respectable
parentage, and well brought up, is led astray, it cannot adopt
Goldsmith's recipe and die. It has not even the more prosaic alternative
of being made an honest word by marriage, and escaping the name under
which it stooped to folly, and was betrayed. It drags on a dishonored
life, with little or no chance of recovering its character, inflicting
cruel disgrace upon the unlucky family of ideas, no matter what their
own innocence and respectability, to which it happens to belong. Thus
Casuistry, if not a very useful, was at least a perfectly harmless,
member of society, and moved in the best circles, until in an evil hour
she became too intimate with the unpopular Jesuits.

A few years ago, when high feeding and sermonizing proved too much for
the virtue of garotters, and, waxing fat, they not only kicked society,
but danced hornpipes in hobnailed boots upon its head and stomach, even
Philanthropy, at once the most fashionable and popular word of this
century, was all but compromised by Sir Joshu