There are many varieties of the widow and all are not beautiful. For one, there is the widow who is bent on re-marrying whether men like it or not; that thing of prey who goes about the world seeking whom she may devour; that awful creature who bears down on her victims with a vigour in her assaults which puts to flight the popular fancy about the weaker sex and the natural distribution of power. No hawk poised over a brood of hedge birds, no shark cruising steadily towards a shoal of small fry, no piratical craft sailing under a free flag and accountable to no law save success, was ever more formidable to the weaker things pursued than is the hawk widow to men when she is bent on re-marrying. She knows so much!--there is not a manoeuvre by which a victory can be stolen that she has not mastered and she is not afraid of even the most desperate measures. When she has once struck, he would be a clever man and a strong one who should escape her. Generally left but meagrely provided for in worldly goods--else her game would not be difficult--she makes up for her financial poverty by her wealth of bold resources, and by the courage with which she takes her own fortunes in hand and, with her own, those of her more eligible masculine associates. She is a woman of purpose and lives for an end; and that end is remarriage, with the most favourable settlement that can be obtained by her lawyer from his. If fate has dealt hardly by her--though, may be, compassionately by her successive spouses--and has landed her in the widowed state twice or thrice, she is in nowise daunted and as little abashed. She merely refits after a certain time of anchorage, and goes out into the open again for a repetition of her chance. She has no notion of a perpetuity of weeds, and, though she may have cleared her half century with a margin besides, thinks the suggestive orange-blossoms of the bride infinitely more desirable than the fruitless heliotrope of the widow. If one husband is taken, she remembers the old proverb, and reflects on the many, quite as good, who are left potentially subject to her choice. And somehow she manages. It has been said that any woman can marry any man if she determines to do so, and follows on the line of her determination with tenacity and common-sense.