For Castle Garden is a famous place for weddings. Romances begun in the old country or on shipboard, and eke runaway matches to this distant Gretna Green find fusion here. Plenty of girls also come to America to unanticipated homes. A curious feature of the supply agency of the bureau is its match-making offices. The commissioners are applied to by men in this country for wives—perhaps on the principle that if a man marries he will be compelled to support a German or Irish girl anyway, so he might as well marry one and have done with trouble on that score. Sometimes, also, a man sends by mail his request, as who should say, “Please forward to my address in good order, upon approval, one (1) wife, per express.” The original of the following letter was shown me at the superintendent’s office: “FORT CŒUR D’ALENE, IDAHO TERRITORY. “DEAR SIR:—Having noticed in the columns of some New York papers that some young men have procured good wives at the Castle Garden, and as I presume that the demand is not equal to the supply, I am desirous of having a good, honest woman for a wife and would make an offer of a comfortable home to a deserving woman. Of course the lady must be consulted about taking her chances in coming out this far, but I am making this offer in good faith and would like an answer as soon as your convenience will permit. My reasons for sending so far are—I am keeping a hotel, stables and ranch on one of the few routes to the newly discovered Cœur d’Alene gold fields, am doing a fair business, am a young bachelor not yet thirty-two, and can’t find a girl of any use to me inside of three hundred miles. So I thought I, being a New Yorker myself, would send and have you try and procure me a life-partner. Hoping this may meet with kind favor I am, yours, etc., “M. E. L.” There is never any difficulty in making up these improvised matches, but the wooers, like young Lochinvar, have to come out from the West and make their own selections. So far as reported, these matches result happily, which goes to show that connubial felicity does not always follow the law of natural selection. Perhaps the matches that are made in Castle Garden are different from those reputed to have been made in heaven. Somewhat too much of incident.