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of the flesh is really based upon the flesh itself, where
there is too much of it for beauty and grace, not merely upon the
process employed in getting rid of it.
Ask any fat man--or better still, any formerly fat man--if I am not
correct. But do not ask a fat woman unless, as in the case of possible
fire at a theater, you already have looked about you and chosen the
nearest exit. Taken as a sex, women are more likely to be touchy upon
this detail where it applies to themselves than men are.
I have a notion that probably the late Lucrezia Borgia did not start
feeding her house guests on those deep-dish poison pies with which her
name historically is associated until after she grew sensitive about the
way folks dropping in at the Borgia home for a visit were sizing up her
proportions on the bias, so to speak. And I attribute the development of
the less pleasant side of Cleopatra's disposition--keeping asps around
the house and stabbing the bearers of unpleasant tidings with daggers
and feeding people to the crocodiles and all that sort of thing--to the
period when she found her anklets binding uncomfortably and along
toward half past ten o'clock of an evening was seized by a well-nigh
uncontrollable longing to excuse herself from the company and run
upstairs and take off her jeweled stomacher and things and slip into
something loose.
[Illustration: "64 BROAD."]
But upon this subject men are less inclined to be fussy, and by the same
token more inclined, on having accomplished a cure, to take a
justifiable pride in it and to brag publicly about it. As I stated a moment
ago, I claim Mr. Blythe viewed the matter in a proper and

commendable light when he took pen in hand to describe more or less
at length his reduction processes. So, too, did that other notable of the
literary world, Mr. Vance Thompson. Mr. Thompson would be the last
one to deny that once upon a time he undeniably was large. The first
time I ever saw him--it was in Paris some years ago, and he was
walking away from me and had his back to me and was wearing a box
coat--I thought for a moment they were taking a tractor across town.
All that, however, belongs to the past. Just so soon as Mr. Thompson
had worked out a system of dieting and by personal application had
proved its success he wrote the volume Eat and Grow Thin, embodying
therein his experiences, his course of treatment and his advice to former
fellow sufferers. So you see in saying now what I mean to say I do but
follow in the mouth-prints of the famous.
Besides, when I got fat I capitalized my fatness in the printed word. I
told how it felt to be fat.
I described how natural it was for a fat man to feel like the Grand
Cañon before dinner and like the Royal Gorge afterwards.
I told how, if he wedged himself into a telephone booth and said, "64
Broad," persons overhearing him were not sure whether he was asking
Central for a number or telling a tailor what his waist measurements
were.
I told how deeply it distressed him as he walked along, larding the earth
as he passed, to hear bystanders making ribald comments about the
inadvisability of trying to move bank vaults through the streets in the
daytime. And now that, after fifteen years of fatness, I am getting thin
again--glory be!--wherein, I ask, is the impropriety in furnishing the
particulars for publication; the more especially since my own tale, I
fondly trust, may make helpful telling for some of my fellow creatures?
When you can offer a boon to humanity and at the same time be paid
for it the dual advantage is not to be decried.
CHAPTER II
Those Romping Elfin Twenties

It has been my personal observation, viewing the matter at close range,
that nearly always fat, like old age or a thief in the dark, steals upon one
unawares. I take my own case. As a youngster and on through my teens
and into my early twenties--ah, those romping elfin twenties!--I was, in
outline, what might be termed dwindly, not to say slimmish. Those who
have known me in my latter years might be loath to believe it, but one
of my boyhood nick-names--I had several, and none of them was
complimentary but all of them were graphic--was Bonesy. At sixteen,
by striping myself in alternate whites and blacks, I could have hired out
for a surveyor's rod. At twenty-one I measured six feet the long way,
and if only mine had been a hook nose I should have cast a shadow like
a