I have frequently observed your praiseworthy though unavailing attempts to reduce your domestic expenses, by getting your wards and daughters "off your hands." I regret to say I have seen much energy on your parts misdirected, and many an elegant and expensive supper given by you to no purpose. Now, to prevent these failures in future, and to allow the "dear girls" a better chance of getting "comfortably settled" in life, I am about to confide to you a secret, which experience has shown me to be well worth knowing. What I would first ask you, is the primary object of all evening parties? Why do you engage Weippert's band, or order your supper and ices from Gunter? Is it—candidly now between ourselves—to make your friends happy? Or is it not to catch some amiable and independent young bachelor, who is willing to make your girl the partner of his bosom and banker's account? Of course you are people of the world, and don't mind throwing one of Gunter's sprats to catch an aristocratic herring. To command success, however, in this style of marital fishing, one thing, let me tell you, above all, is necessary, and that is, a conservatory leading from the ball-room. Think, oh ye Parents and Guardians! for a moment of the advantages of such an arrangement. The bashful or timid young man, after the quadrille, is sure to propose a temporary retirement among the flowers, because they afford him something beyond the weather to talk about, and if he only be matrimonially disposed, no place—depend upon it—is more likely to make him speak out. For instance, he asks the young lady to pick him a Camelia, she does so of course, and, if she has nice eyelashes, takes advantage of the opportunity afforded her, to display some little timidity and the said eyelashes while arranging the leaves. But if not blest with those bewitching adjuncts to a pretty face, I have known a half-suppressed sigh from the interesting creature answer very well; for your bashful young gentleman very frequently labours under the notion that he is a lady-killer; and ten to one but he is thus led to think he has made a conquest of the poor girl, and so, resolving to make her happy, proposes on the spot. The conservatory is quite as useful for what is called "the fast man," or for the man of the world, or indeed for any other species of the genus _homo_; though of course the treatment must in each of these cases be judiciously varied.