"Well, first, there's the engagement-ring, not a sign of love, you understand, but a thing to be discussed and compared with all the engagement-rings, past, present, and to come, with Tom's ring, and Dick's ring, and Harry's ring. If you could have heard the girls tell over the prices of the different engagement-rings for the last six months, and bring up with Rivington's, which, it seems, is a solitaire worth a thousand! Henceforth nothing less is to be thought of. Then the wedding present to your wife. Rivington gives $30,000 worth of diamonds. Wedding fees, wedding journey to every expensive place that can be thought of, you ought to have a little fortune to begin with. The lovely creatures are perfectly rapacious in their demands under these heads. I heard full lists of where they were going and what they wanted to have. Then comes a house, in a fashionable quarter, to the tune of fifty thousand dollars; then furniture, carriages, horses, opera-boxes. The short of the matter is, old Van Arsdel's family are having a jolly time on the income of a million. There are six of them, and every one wants to set up in life on the same income. So, you see, the sum is how to divide a million so as to make six millions out of it. The way to do it is plain. Each son and daughter must marry a million, and get as much of a man or woman with it as pleases heaven." "And suppose some of them should love some _man_, or woman, more than gold or silver, and choose love in place of money?" said I. "Well," said Jim, "that's quite supposable; any of these girls is capable of it. But after all, it would be rough on a poor girl to take her at her word. What do they know about it? The only domestic qualification the most practical of them ever think of attaining, is how to make sponge-cake. I believe, when they are thinking of getting married, they generally make a little sponge-cake, and mix a salad dressing, that fits them for the solemn and awful position of wife and mother, which you hear so much about. Now, the queenly Alice is a splendid girl, and can talk French and German and Italian; but her knowledge of natural history is limited. I imagine she thinks gloves grow in packs on the trees, and artificial flowers are raised from seed, and dresses develop by uniform laws of nature at the rate of three or four a month. If you could get the darling to fly to your arms, and the old gentleman should come 'round, and give her what he could afford, how could you console her when she finds out the price of gloves and gaiter-boots, and all the ordinary comforts? I'm afraid the dear child will be ready to murder you for helping her to her own way. So you see, _Jim_ doesn't invest in engagement-rings this year." Thereupon I sung: "A sly old fox one day did spy, A bunch of grapes that hung so high," &c.