If Angelina really intends to marry on an income varying between 300_l._ and 500_l._ a year, she must sit down and weigh the _pros_ and _cons_ most carefully. Dress and house-rent are the two items that have risen considerably during the last few years; otherwise everything is much cheaper and nicer than it used to be before New Zealand meat came to the front, and sugar, tea, cheese, all the thousand and one items one requires in a house, became lower than ever they had been before; and therefore, if she be clever and willing to put her shoulder to the domestic wheel, she can most certainly get along much more comfortably in the way of food than she used to do. For example, when I was married, sugar was 6_d._ a pound, and now it is 2_d._; and instead of paying 1_s._ 1_d._ a pound for legs of mutton, I give 7½_d._ for New Zealand meat, which is as good as the best English mutton that one can buy. Bread, too, is 5½_d._--and ought to be considerably lower--as against the 8_d._ and 9_d._ of seventeen years ago; and, besides this, there are a thousand-and-one small things to be bought that one never used to see, and fish and game are also infinitely less expensive, for in the season salmon is no longer a luxury, thanks to Frank Buckland, while prime cod at 4_d._ a pound can hardly be looked upon as a sinful luxury, and this is the price we paid in the season in the Central Fish Market, where fish is always to be obtained fresh, cheap, and in as great a variety as at any West End shop; while of course those detestable Stores, much as I personally dislike them, have done much for us in lowering the prices of grocers, who are always willing to give ready-money purchasers every advantage, the while they are civil, send the purchased articles home, make out their own bills, and take care their customers are not worried to death, as they are at the Stores by supercilious youths, who make the place a rendezvous, and simper with girls who have been sent to do shopping, and combine it with large instalments of flirtation. No, I must say I have not one good word for the Stores; and, furthermore, I detest them because, living as I do a little way out of town, I am persecuted on my return journeys with enormous parcels, of all sorts and descriptions, that jam one’s elbows, fall down incontinently on one’s best bonnet, and are pushed under one’s feet, until the twenty minutes’ travel are rendered purgatorial by people who will shop at the Stores, and are in consequence turned completely for the nonce into beasts of burden, all to save a very problematic shilling or two; but as cabs to and from the station have to be added to the fare to town, I venture to state they would be far better served by a local grocer, or by either Whiteley or Shoolbred, whose prices are the same as at the Stores, and whose carts come to one’s door. But these little points are just where the ordinary woman’s finance comes utterly to an end. She can readily