human caravans attached to a party bound for a foreign clime may be all very well, but anything in excess of that proportion is intolerable, more particularly as everything the pedestrian-pocket lends or bestows is doled out with a supercilious courtesy which implies as plainly as possible that he thinks you ought to carry it yourself. A wellregulated pocket is the token of a well-regulated mind. It should neither contain too much nor too little, and whatever its contents, they ought to be in the most perfect order.

The primary and only proper use of the pocket is to put fitting things in, not to serve as a receptacle for idle hands. A somewhat laborious attempt has been made to prove that the boy who goes about with his hands in his pockets must needs grow up a dolt. It is to be hoped that this theory will not stand the test of actual experience. If all the grown-up boys who go about hands-in-pockets were deficient in point of intellect, the number of idiots in the world would be very large indeed. It is, however, true that within moderate limits and with a certain reserve, the habit of using the pockets as gloves, handbaskets, muffs, or warmers, bespeaks

lack of earnest business purpose and industry, which is not a promising quality. Some people appear to use their pockets as bags to keep their hands out of mischief. Public speakers of a certain type are very much addicted to this practice. It is probably an intuitive expedient to save themselves from the danger of having their attention diverted from what they are saying by anything their unruly extremities might otherwise be doing. To judge from the ungainly fashion in which the hands of unaccustomed or timid speakers are wont to crush hats-not always the property of their destroyers-and come down heavily in the shape of impassioned pounding, or what are familiarly known as "crow-pitches," on the heads of unoffending auditors, the precaution is not altogether needless. Particularly laboriously-minded people seem to carry their hands in their pockets whenever they are doing nothing, as a demonstrative intimation to the world in general that they have nothing to do. The habit has obtained among sailors, possibly on this principle. We grownup men and women are, after all, only large and strange children, and we indicate our moods

and states of being and feeling by act and bearing. Persons of importance and conscious wisdom, great authorities, and consulting sort of people, carry their hands in their pockets, as who should say, "Look at me, my days of doing are past, I am enjoying the fruits of my labours. I am a person of experience." The idea symbolised is rest from labour; a general pocketing of results, after the hand-with-hand struggle of life is practically over.

XXII.

TOPOGRAPHICAL INSTINCT.

THERE is a class of persons endowed with the marvellous faculty of finding their way about in a manner wholly incomprehensible to less gifted mortals. Set them down where and in what way you please, they will not only discover the locality as though by instinct, but of their own intuitive genius contrive to make themselves quite at home, or escape with a celerity as perplexing to understand as it is surprising to witness. Everybody has met typical specimens of this peculiar variety of human nature, and to most, probably, it has occurred that the topographical instinct must be closely akin to the sense, or whatever it be, which reaches its highest development in carrier pigeons, and is exhibited in such perfection by dogs, and occasionally even by cats. Mr. Darwin would, no doubt, explain that the faculty

only exceptionally displayed by man is identical with that enjoyed by the lower animals, that it always exists and may be called into activity by proper training. There are men who can climb, and swing, and shoot from bough to bough, with all the agility of monkeys; and if the stories of experienced sportsmen are trustworthy, individuals of the highest species sometimes vie with their pointers, if not in keenness of sight and scent, in the power of discovering game by some other' faculty which baffles comprehension. The ques

tion for the philosopher is whether in man reason entirely supplies the place of the grosser instincts, or if the powers and faculties of the human mind are the same—only more highly developed as those which inspire the inferior members of the animal kingdom, and in seeming wisdom often surpass our own more rational intellects. While the student of psychology is cudgelling his brains with this profound enigma, perhaps it may be permitted to those who have no pretensions to a superior insight, to indulge in a few, probably very wild, and certainly crude, conjectures.