Rensselaer Union, Volume 11, Number 28, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 27 March 1879 — The Hole in the Top of the Pocket. [ARTICLE]

The Hole in the Top of the Pocket.

If a person loses a little change, a door-key, or a pen-knife, or some other trifles through the bottom of his pocket he feels more annoyed at his own carelessness in not discovering the hole than his loss. Yet there is many a man who suffers the inconvenience and embarrassment of poverty in consequence of an enormous opening in his pocket, and he goes on from day to day, from month to month, and year to year —from boyhood to age—without ever discovering the source of hie misery, or reflecting that the opening might be made smaller. The reason is that the opening is in the top instead of the bottom of the pocket. This hole in the top of the pocket is always open. The draught through it is something enormous. The attraction of gravitation, it is true, cannot operate throngh it, but the frequent insertion of the owner’s hand makes up for the deficiency. Keeping this opening in tbe top of the pocket prudently dosed, or permitting it to be too much and too often extended in one’s youth, makes the disYereucS TriaHer ltffe, Ahdln old age, between dependence and independence, between poverty and wealth.

It becomes every young man to keep a sharp lookout for this bole in the top of the pocket. A thousand insidious attacks upon his substance are made through it. A firm resolution and an established system are absolutely requisite to regulate his outgoes. Many a man who could command an army has never been able to proportion bis own expenses down less than his receipts, but it has very likely shaken his resolution and self-control more severely than all his military exploits. We hear a great deal about.swindlers and thieves and robbers and burglars, but where one man is ruined or injured by these, a thousand are ruined or injured by the too ready and too frequent insertion of their own hand in their own pockets through the opening at the top. We warn the young men that in closing this opening the old adage emphatically applies, “A stitch in time save nine.’’— Baptist Weekly.