ardener! For all your "yellow plush," you are
Sans-culottes, every man of you.

Now, I deem it a high testimony to my powers of judgment that I never
entertained these views. On the contrary, I always upheld the doctrine
that society, like a broken thigh-bone, did best on an "inclined plane,"
and I repudiated equality with the scorn a man six feet high would feel
were he told that the human standard was to be four and a half. The only
grudge I did feel towards the fortunate man of wealth was that I should
lose so many brilliant years of life in acquiring--for acquire it I
would--what I would far rather employ in dispensing. A guinea at
twenty is worth a hundred at thirty, a thousand at forty, a million at
sixty,--that's the geometrical mean of life. Glorious youth, that only
needs "debentures" to be divine!

My head became clearer and my brain more unclouded as I walked along in
the free air of the morning, and I felt that with a cigar I should both
compose my vagrant fancies, and cheat myself out of the necessity of
a breakfast. Excellent weed! that can make dulness imaginative, and
imagination plodding; that renders stupid men companionable to clever
ones, and gives a meek air of thought to the very flattest insipidity!

I searched my pocket for the little case that contained my Manillas, but
in vain; I tried another,--like result. How was it? I always carried it
in my great-coat: had I been robbed? I could not help laughing at the
thought, it sounded so ineffably comic. I essayed again, alas! with no
better success. Could I have placed it in the breast-pocket? What! there
is no breast-pocket! How is this, Con? Has Thumbo-rig its influence over
you yet? I passed my hand across my brow, and tried to remember if the
breast-pocket had only been a tradition of another coat, or what had
become of it. Pockets do not close from being empty, like county banks,
nor do they dry up, like wells, from disuse.

"No, no; there certainly was once one here." As I said this, what was
my amazement to find that the pocket for which I had been searching
had changed sides, and gone from left to right! "Oh, this is too bad!"
thought I; "with a little more punch, I could have fancied that I had
put my coat on wrong-sided. Here is a mystery!" said I, "and now, to
solve it patiently;" and so I sat me down by the wayside, and, laying my
bundle on the ground, began to reflect.

Reflection, I soon found, was of no use. Habit--the instinct of