member that marriages are made in Heaven, not in
her drawing-room. The melancholy truth is that the gentle craft of
match-making has been so vulgarized by course and clumsy professors, and
its very name has in consequence been brought into such disrepute, that
few respectable women have the courage openly to recognise it. They are
haunted by visions of the typical match-maker who does work for
fashionable novels and social satires, and who is a truly awful
personage. To her alone of mortals is it given to inspire, like the
Harpies, at once contempt and fear. Keen-eyed and hook-nosed, like a
bird of prey, she glowers from the corner of crowded ball-rooms upon the
unconscious heir, hunts him untiringly from house to house, marries him
remorselessly to her eldest daughter, and then never loses sight of him
till his spirit is broken, his old friends discarded, and his segar-case
thrown away.

It is scarcely necessary to say that this fearful being exists only in
fiction. In real life she has not only to marry her daughters, but also,
like other human beings, to eat, drink, sleep, and otherwise dispose of
the twenty-four hours of the day. She cannot therefore very well devote
herself, from morning to night, to the one occupation of heir-hunting,
with the precision of a machine, or one of Bunyan's walking vices. But
still there must be some truth even in a caricature, and a man sometimes
finds a girl "thrown at his head," as the process is forcibly termed,
with a coarse-mindedness quite worthy of the typical match-maker, though
also with a clumsiness which she would heartily despise.

He goes as a stranger to some place, and is astonished to find himself
at once taken to the bosom and innermost confidence of people whose very
name he never heard before, as if he were their oldest and most familiar
friend. He is asked to dinner one day, to breakfast the next, and warmly
assured that a place is always kept for him at lunch. Charmed and
flattered to find his many merits so quickly discovered and thoroughly
appreciated by strangers, he votes them the cleverest, most genial, most
hospitable people he ever met; and everything goes on delightfully until
he begins to think it odd that he should be constantly left alone with,
and now and then delicately chaffed about, some _passee_, ill-favored
woman, whom he no more connects with any thought of marriage than he
would a female rhinoceros. And then slowly dawns upon him the cruel
trut