all pocket they would
never be Johns, for no Jill would be so demented as to "come tumbling
after" them. I have seen a pocket marry off a hump-back, a twisted
foot and sixty winters' fall of snow upon the head, while a pocketless
Adonis sighed in vain for Beauty's glance. A full pocket balances an
empty skull as a good heart cannot; a plethoric pocket overshadows
monstrous vices.

But at his cleanly best, John's pockets are an integral part of his
personality. He feels after his pocket instinctively while yet in what
corresponds in the _genus homo_ with the polywog state in batrachia.
The incipient man begins to strut as soon as mamma puts pockets into
his kilted skirt--a stride as prophetic as the strangled crow of the
cockerel upon the lowest bar of the fence.

The direst penance Johnny can know is to have his pockets stitched up
because he will keep his hands in them. To deny him the right is to do
violence to natural laws. He is the born money-maker, bread-winner,
provider--the _huesbonda_ of our Anglo-Saxon ancestry--and the pocket
is his heraldic symbol, his birthright.

The pocket question obtrudes itself at an alarmingly early period of
married life--whoever may be the moneyed member of the new firm. When,
as most frequently happens, this is John, the ultra-conscientious may
think that he ought, prior to the wedding-day, to have hinted to his
highland or lowland Mary, that he did not intend to throw unlimited
gold into her apron every day. If he had touched this verity however
remotely, she would not have married him. The man who speaks the
straight-forward truth in such circumstances might as well put a knife
to his throat, if love and life are synonyms.

Honest John, thrusting his hands well towards the bottom of his
pockets, smiles sheepishly, yet knowingly, in listening to this
"discourse." Courtship is one thing and marriage is another in his
code. Mary's primal mistake is in assuming--(upon John's authority, I
regret as his advocate to say), that the two states are one and the
same. Moonlight vows and noonday action should, according to her
theory, be in exact harmony. John does not deceive consciously.
Wemmick's office tenets differed diametrically from those he held at
Walworth where his aged parent toasted the muffins, and Miss. Skiffins
made the tea. The mellow fervency of John's "With all my worldly goods
I thee endow"--must be taken in a Pickwickian and Cupidian sense.
Reason and experience sust