Stand forth, honest John! and let us behold you, as God made and your mother—­in blood, or in heart—­trained you.  Let the imagination of my readers survey him, as he plants himself before us.  Albeit a trifle more conscious than a woman would be in like circumstances, of the leading fact that he has the full complement of hands and feet usually prescribed by Nature, he bears scrutiny bravely.  He is what he would denominate in another, “a white man;” square in his dealings with his fellow-men and with a soft place, on the sunny side of his heart, for the women.  He would add—­“God bless them!” did we allow him to speak.  Men of his sort rarely think of their own womenkind or of pure, gentle womanhood in the abstract, without a benediction, mental or audible.

Our specimen, you will note, as he begins to feel at ease in the honorable pillory to which we have called him—­puts his hands into his pockets.  The gesture supplies us with the first clause of our illustrated lecture.  Without his pockets John would be a cipher, and a decimal cipher at that.  If some men were not 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.