Such matches are hasty, and poorly considered. They lead to gossip and resentment of relatives, and an uncomfortable ill-feeling, seldom cured for a full generation. If one has beauty and refinement and is poor, never mind the poverty; the good qualities are more than a balance. But the marriage of a millionaire’s daughter with a coachman is supreme folly. It ends in disunion, and never in harmony. Water and oil will as soon mix as such elements. Avoid them. _Don’t marry a doubly divorced man or woman_: it’s risky. Something is wrong surely. One divorce should cure any one. Two is a profusion. It may be that the doubly divorced is innocent,--he will claim to be; but if he seeks a new party to a possible divorce case (it will be a habit by this time), tell him to wait a little longer. Grass widows may be very lovable creatures, but unless their other halves were clearly blamable, beyond reasonable question, give them a wide road and avoid them entirely. It is a very bad sign, possibly a habit, that a man and woman mate and divide soon after; the fault may belong to either, and most likely relates to both, in similar proportions. _Don’t marry a miser._ Of all the old “curmudgeons” on earth, deliver me from crabbed, narrow-minded, pinch-penny, miserable misers. They begrudge you your meals and clothing. They count your shillings and control your pin purchases; they make life a burden, by owning much and using little, and eternally twit you of every quarter used ever so sparingly. Life is made to live in and enjoy. We make only one journey. We need not open up our purses and leak out the pennies, just to see them roll around promiscuously; but cutting notches on a stick for each one of them, and never spending, even for necessaries, without dread and grudging, is intolerable. I had rather be poor and enjoy something. _Don’t marry too far apart in ages._ June and December is a long, long distance in matrimony. Some people are as young-hearted at sixty as others are at forty. Some men at forty-five have hardly reached their manhood. But old, white-headed men, marrying girls in their teens--servants generally--are pitiable spectacles. To the girl it is suicide; to the man sheer folly; no need of marrying the man. The girl is the most interested in this don’t sentence. Why not, if you love him? This is the reason, not jealousy,--that is a partial reason,--but consistency. Think of a trip round the world or across the continent with one older than your father, to be called your husband, to be your husband! It must be humiliating. It is annoying. It is foolishly silly and inconsistent. Money is a small compensation for such a sacrifice. Love, and love only, should govern marriage, and I doubt its sincerity when the difference goes beyond reason.