believe they can detect a hero or heroine in every object that appeals to their pity; and if Master Bull would be less wicked, or more discriminating in his wickedness, "asking" would cease to be a profitable profession, and the æstheticism of mendicity would no longer be a fact with formidable social effects and remote consequences. XXI. USES OF THE POCKET. WHO does not remember his or her first pocket ; when the expanding intellect was promoted to the care of its own pocket-handkerchief? How we felt in it, boasted of its depth, and tested its capacity by trying to cram everything we could call "our own," into its elongated orifice. How the early pockets of life distinguished the two sexes. The girls with pins and needles, occasionally stuck and folded neatly into little scraps of cloth or paper, but far more frequently loose; balls of cotton, always unwound, skeins of silk in a perpetual tangle, and cuttings of serge and satin agreeably commingled with the pet legs and arms of playfully dismembered dolls. The boys with apples and alley-taws, knives with two blades that would never quite shut, sticks of slate pencil, marvellously pointed, wooden pea and quill potato shooters, and, above all, peg-tops, buttons, and lumps of chalk and lengths of string, with, later on, short pieces of cane curiously burnt and blackened by furtive attempts at "smoking." What a host of sweet and sad memories the mere mention of those happy days of skirt and trouser pockets recalls! Some excellent and joyous spirits there are who contrive to prolong the happy pocket epoch, with its little sorrows and rejoicings over carefully lost and accidentally found sixpences and important memoranda. Thrice blessed mortals, always bewildered but ever young. A general emptying of pockets. Who dare face so close a scrutiny into the secrets of life and character ? What disclosures of weakness and wantonness would ensue. How many reputations for method and exemplary propriety must be shattered, and how few could hope to survive so severe an ordeal. There is a species of man who is always in a muddle, but who contrives, with the aid of a ready faculty of excuse, to keep his secret, so that nobody, besides himself, knows the multiplicity and extent of his bewilderment. How He would he like to turn out his pockets with the chaos of letters, papers, mislaid reminders, and unpaid bills? He stuffs everything into this much abused receptacle, and, with a dim sense of having done, or being ready to do, his duty, forgets all about it immediately afterwards. Letters to be read, answered, or posted, all go into the same oblivion, and are turned out sometimes days, weeks, or even years, and perhaps never, afterwards. can find nothing when he wants it; and it is always in looking for something else that he again lights upon it. Without a pocket he would be miserable. It is the abyss wherein he buries all his disagreeables, but, as the useful and pleasant things go there too, he loses almost as much as he gains by the convenience. Happy is the innocent muddler if he has some kindly hand at home to supervise his lumber-bag, and especially to be pitied is the genius who, with such a propensity for disorder, is left wholly to the mercy of his servants. What qualms of conscience and surges of worry must come over him when he reflects what the pockets in that coat, so carelessly cast aside, may contain, and to how many of his own and other people's secrets they would supply the clue? To make a confidant of a friend with bulky pockets is an act of folly, likely to be fraught with the most awkward consequences. The use made of the pocket is a sure indication of character. The man or woman who confounds its functions with the domestic tidy is not more seriously at fault than the eccentric being who makes it play the part of a kit or saddle bag. There are individuals who seem to carry about in their pockets all the appliances of ordinary life and vicissitude; relays of handkerchiefs, cigarcases, nail-scissors, knives, combs, looking-glasses, ever-pointed pencils, apparatus for extracting stones from horses' shoes, dictionaries, mariners' compasses, tooth-picks, waterproof coats, travelling caps, balls of string, boxes of matches, telescopes, penny postage-stamps, and, most wonderful of all, pocket-umbrellas. It is the playful boast of such complete furnishers that they can go anywhere without change of raiment, and it is easy to believe them. But they are people to be admired rather than imitated. are unpleasant to deal with. Useful to know, they |