Mrs. Rachel Sutton was a born match maker, and she had cultivated

the gift by diligent practice. As the sight of a tendrilled vine

suggests the need and fitness of a trellis, and a stray glove

invariably brings to mind the thought of its absent fellow, so every

disengaged spinster of marriageable age was an appeal--pathetic and

sure--to the dear woman's helpful sympathy, and her whole soul went

out in compassion over such "nice" and an appropriated bachelors as

crossed her orbit, like blind and dizzy comets.

Her propensity, and her conscientious indulgence of the same, were

proverbial among her acquaintances, but no one--not even prudish and

fearsome maidens of altogether uncertain age, and prudent mammas,

equally alive to expediency and decorum--had ever labelled her

"Dangerous," while with young people she was a universal favorite.

Although, with an eye single to her hobby, she regarded a man as an

uninteresting molecule of animated nature, unless circumstances

warranted her in recognizing in him the possible lover of some

waiting fair one, and it was notorious that she reprobated as worse

than useless--positively demoralizing, in fact--such friendships

between young persons of opposite sexes as held out no earnest of

prospective betrothal, she was confidante-general to half the girls

in the county, and a standing advisory committee of one upon all

points relative to their associations with the beaux of the region.

The latter, on their side, paid their court to the worthy and

influential widow as punctiliously, if not so heartily, as did their

gentle friends. Not that the task was disagreeable. At fifty years

of age, Mrs. Button was plump and comely; her fair curls unfaded,

and still full and glossy; her blue eyes capable of languishing into

moist appreciation of a woful heart-history, or sparkling

rapturously at the news of a triumphant wooing; her little fat hands

were swift and graceful, and her complexion so infantine in its

clear white and pink as to lead many to believe and some--I need

not say of which gender--to practise clandestinely upon the story

that she had bathed her face in warm milk, night and morning, for

forty years. The more sagacious averred, however, that the secret of

her continued youth lay in her kindly, unwithered heart, in her

loving thoughtfulness for others' weal, and her avoidance, upon

philosophical and religions grounds, of whatever approximated the

discontented retrospection winch goes with the multitude by the name

of self-examination.

Our bonnie widow had her foibles and vanities, but the first were

amiable, the latter superficial and harmless, usually rather

pleasant than objectionable. She was very proud, for instance, of

her success in the profession she had taken up, and which she

pursued con amore; very jealous for the reputation for connubial

felicity of those she had aided to couple in the leash matrimonial,

and more uncharitable toward malicious meddlers or thoughtless

triflers with the course of true love; more implacable to

match-breakers than to the most atrocious phases of schism, heresy,

and sedition in church or state, against which she had, from her

childhood, been taught to pray. The remotest allusion to a divorce

case threw her into a cold perspiration, and apologies for such

legal severance of the hallowed bond were commented upon as rank and

noxious blasphemy, to which no Christian or virtuous woman should

lend her ear for an instant. If she had ever entertained "opinions"

hinting at the allegorical nature of the Mosaic account of the Fall,

her theory would unquestionably have been that Satan's insidious

whisper to the First Mother prated of the beauties of feminine

individuality, and enlarged upon the feasibility of an elopement

from Adam and a separate maintenance upon the knowledge-giving,

forbidden fruit. Upon second marriages--supposing the otherwise

indissoluble tie to have been cut by Death--she was a trifle less

severe, but it was generally understood that she had grave doubts as

to their propriety--unless in exceptional cases.




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