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.