Are there any who doubt of this? Let them inquire for one Leniter Salix, and ask his opinion. Leniter may be ragged, but his philosophy has not so many holes in it as might be inferred from the state of his wardrobe. Nay, it is the more perfect on that account; a knowledge of the world penetrates the more easily when, from defective apparel, we approach the nearer to our original selves. Leniter’s hat is crownless, and the clear light of knowledge streams without impediment upon his brain. He is not bound up in the strait jacket of prejudice, for he long since pawned his solitary vest, and his coat, made for a Goliath, hangs about him as loosely as a politician’s principles, or as the purser’s shirt in the poetical comparison. Salix has so long bumped his head against a stone wall, that he has knocked a hole in it, and like Cooke, the tragedian, sees through his error. He has speculated as extensively in experience as if it were town lots. The quantity of that article he has purchased, could it be made tangible, would freight a seventy-four;—were it convertible into cash, Crœsus would be a Chelsea pensioner to Salix. But unluckily for him, there are stages in life when experience itself is more ornamental than useful. When, to use a forcible expression—when a man is “done,”—it matters not whether he has as much experience as Samson had hair, or as Bergami had whisker—he can do no more. Salix has been in his time so much pestered with _duns_, “hateful to gods and men,” that he is _done_ himself. “The sun was rushing down the west,” as Banim has it, attending to its own business, and, by that means, shedding benefit upon the world, when Leniter Salix was seen in front of a little grocery, the _locale_ of which shall be nameless, sitting dejectedly upon a keg of mackerel, number 2. He had been “the best-natured fellow in the world,” but, as the geologists say, he was in a state of transition, and was rapidly becoming up to _trap_. At all events, he had his nose to the grindstone, an operation which should make men keen. He was houseless, homeless, penniless, and the grocery man had asked him to keep an eye upon the dog, for fear of the midsummer catastrophe which awaits such animals when their snouts are not in a birdcage. This service was to be recompensed with a cracker, and a glass of what the shopman was pleased to call _racky mirackilis_, a fluid sometimes termed “railroad,” from the rapidity with which it hurries men to the end of their journey. Like many of the best-natured fellows in the world, Salix, by way of being a capital companion, and of not being different from others, had acquired rather a partiality for riding on this “railroad,” and he agreed to keep his trigger eye on the dog. “That’s right, Salix. I always knowed you were the best-natured fellow in the world.”