One Third Off | Page 3

shepherd's crook.
My avocation in life was such as to induce slenderness. I was the city
staff of a small-town daily paper, and what with dodging round
gathering up items about people to write for the paper and then dodging
round to avoid personal contact with the people I had written the items
about for the paper, I was kept pretty constantly upon the go. In our
part of the country in those days the leading citizens were prone to take
offense at some of the things that were said of them in the public prints
and given to expressing their sense of annoyance forcibly. When a
high-spirited Southern gentleman, regarding whom something of a
disagreeable nature had appeared in the news columns, entered the
editorial sanctum without knocking, wearing upon his crimsoned face
an expression of forthright irritation and with his right hand stealing
back under his coat skirt, it was time for the offending reporter to
emulate the common example of the native white-throated nut-hatch
and either flit thence rapidly or hunt a hole.
Since prohibition came in and a hiccup became a mark of affluence
instead of a social error, as formerly, and a loaded flank is a sign of
hospitality rather than of menace, things may have changed. I am
speaking, though, of the damper early nineties in Kentucky, when a
sudden motion toward the right hip pocket was a threat and not a
promise, as at present. So, what with first one thing and then another,
now collecting the news of the community and now avoiding the
customary consequences, I did a good deal of running about hither and

yon, and kept fit and spry and stripling-thin.
Yet I ate heartily of all things that appealed to my palate, eating at least
two kinds of hot bread at every meal--down South we say it with
flours--and using chewing tobacco for the salad course, as was the
custom. I ate copiously at and between meals and gained not a whit.
CHAPTER III
Regarding Liver-Eating Watkins and Others
It was after I had moved to New York and had taken a desk job that I
detected myself in the act, as it were, of plumping out. Cognizant of the
fact, as I was, I nevertheless took no curative or corrective measures in
the way of revising my diet. I was content to make excuses inwardly. I
said to myself that I came of a breed whose members in their mature
years were inclined to broaden noticeably. I said to myself that I was
not getting the amount of exercise that once I had; that my occupation
was now more sedentary, and therefore it stood to reason that I should
take on a little flesh here and there over my frame. Moreover, I felt
good. If I had felt any better I could have charged admission. My
appetite was perfect, my digestion magnificent, nay, awe-inspiring.
To me it seemed that physically I was just as active and agile as I had
been in those 'prentice years of my professional career when the ability
to shift quickly from place to place and to think with an ornithological
aptitude were conducive to a continuance of unimpaired health among
young reporters. Anyhow--thus I to myself in the same strain,
continuing--anyhow, I was not actually getting fat. Nothing so gross as
that. I merely was attaining to a pleasant, a becoming and a dignified
fullness of contour as I neared my thirtieth birthday. So why worry
about what was natural and normal among persons of my temperament,
and having my hereditary impulses, upon attaining a given age?
I am convinced that men who are getting fat are generally like that. For
every added pound an added excuse, for each multiplying inch at the
waistline a new plea in abatement to be set up in the mind. I see the
truth of it now. When you start getting fat you start getting fatuous.

With the indubitable proof of his infirmity mounting in superimposed
folds of tissues before his very gaze, with the rounded evidence
presented right there in front of him where he can rest his elbows on it,
your average fattish man nevertheless refuses to acknowledge the
visible situation. Vanity blinds his one eye, love of self-indulgence
blinds the other. Observe now how I speak in the high moral tone of a
reformed offender, which is the way of reformed offenders and other
reformers the world over. We are always most virtuous in retrospect, as
the fact of the crime recedes. Moreover, he who has not erred has but
little to gloat over.
There are two sorts of evidence upon which many judges look
askance--that sort of evidence which is circumstantial and that sort
which purely is hearsay. In this connection, and departing for