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hence pants. I cast a pitying eye at other men, deep of girth and purple
of face, waddling down the platform, and as I scudded on past them I
would say to myself that after all there was a tremendous difference
between being obese and being merely well fleshed out. The real
reason of course was that my legs had remained reasonably firm and
trim while the torso was inflating. For I was one who got fat not all
over at once but in favored localities. And I was even as the husband is
whose wife is being gossiped about--the last person in the
neighborhood to hear the news.
As though it were yesterday I remember the day and the place and the
attendant circumstances when and where awakening was forced upon
me. Two of us went to Canada on a hunting trip. The last lap of the
journey into camp called for a fifteen-mile horseback ride through the
woods. The native who was to be our chief guide met us with our
mounts at a way station far up in the interior of Quebec. He knew my
friend--had guided him for two seasons before; but I was a stranger in
those parts. Now until that hour it had never occurred to me that I was
anywhere nearly so bulksome as this friend of mine was. For he
indubitably was a person of vast displacement and augmented gross
total tonnage; and in that state of blindness which denies us the gift to
see ourselves as others see us I never had reckoned myself to be in his

class, avoir-dupoisefully speaking. But as we lined up two abreast
alongside the station, with our camp duffel piled about us, the
keen-eyed guide, standing slightly to one side, considered our
abdominal profiles, and the look he cast at my companion said as
plainly as words, "Well, I see you've brought a spare set along with you
in case of a puncture."
But he did not come right out and say a thing so utterly tactless. What
he did say, in a worried tone, was that he was sorry now he had not
fetched along a much more powerful horse for me to ride on. He had a
good big chunky work animal, not fast but very strong in the back, he
said, which would have answered my purposes first rate.
I experienced another disillusioning jolt. Could it be that this practiced
woodsman's eye actually appraised me as being as heavy as my mate,
or even heavier? Surely he must be wrong in his judgments. The point
was that I woefully was wrong in mine. How true it is that we who
would pluck the mote from behind a fellow being's waistcoat so rarely
take note of the beam which we have swallowed crosswise!
Even so, a great light was beginning to percolate to my innermost
consciousness. A grave doubt pestered me through our days of camping
there in the autumnal wilderness. When we had emerged from the
woods and had reached Montreal on the homeward trip I enticed my
friend upon a penny-in-the-slot weighing machine in the Montreal
station and I observed what he weighed; and then when he stepped
aside I unostentatiously weighed myself, and in the box score credited
myself with a profound shock; also with an error, which should have
been entered up a long time before that.
Approximately, we were of the same height and in bone structure not
greatly unlike. I had figured that daily tramping after game should have
taken a few folds of superfluous flesh off my frame, and so, no doubt, it
had done. Yet I had pulled the spindle around the face of the dial to a
point which recorded for me a total of sixteen pounds and odd ounces
more than his penny had registered for him.
If he was fat, unmistakably and conclusively fat and he was--what then

was I? In Troy weight--Troy where the hay scales come from--the
answer was written. I was fat as fat, or else the machine had lied. And
as between me and that machine I could pick the liar at the first pick.
CHAPTER V
On Acquiring Some Snappy Pores
That night on the sleeper a splendid resolution sprouted within me.
Next morning when we arrived home it was ready and ripe for plucking.
I would trim myself down to more lithesome proportions and I would
start the job right away. It did not occur to me that cutting down my
daily consumption of provender might prove helpful to the success of
the proposed undertaking. Or if it did occur to me I put the idea sternly
from me, for I was by way of being a robust trencherman. I had joyed
in the pleasures of the table,