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good many religious words
while so engaged--and then I went on the scales to find out what
progress I had made toward attaining the desired result. I had kept off
the scales until then because I was saving up, as it were, to give myself
a nice jolly surprise party.
So I weighed. And I had picked up nine pounds and a half! That was
what I had gained for all my sufferings and all my exertions--that,
along with a set of snappy but emotional pores and a personal
knowledge of how a New England boiled dinner feels just before it
comes on the table.
"This," I said bitterly to myself--"this is sheer foolhardiness! Keep this
up for six weeks more and I'll find myself fallen away to a perfect
three-ton truck. Keep it up for three months and I'll be ready to rent
myself out to the aquarium as a suitable playmate for the leviathan in
the main tank. I shall stop this idiocy before it begins making me
seasick merely to look down at myself as I walk. I may slosh about and
billow somewhat, but I positively decline to heave up and down. I
refuse to be known as the human tidal wave, with women and children
being hurriedly removed to a place of safety at my approach. Right here
and now is where I quit qualifying for the inundation stakes!"
Which accordingly I did. What I did not realize was that the unwonted

exercise gave me such a magnificent appetite that, after a session at the
gymnasium, I ate about three times as much as I usually did at
dinner--and, mark you, I never had been one with the appetite, as the
saying goes, of a bird, to peck at some Hartz Mountain roller's prepared
food and wipe the stray rape seed off my nose on a cuttle-fish bone and
then fly up on the perch and tuck the head under the wing and call it a
meal. I had ever been what might be termed a sincere feeder. So, never
associating the question of diet with the problem of attaining physical
slightness, I swung back again into my old mode of life with the
resigned conviction that since destiny had chosen me to be fat there
was nothing for me to do in the premises excepting to go right on to the
end of my mortal chapter being fat, fatter and perhaps fattest. I'd just
make the best of it.
And I'd use care about crossing a county bridge at any gait faster than a
walk.
Now this continued for years and years, and then here a few months
ago something else happened. And on top of that something else--to wit:
The Great Reduction.
Of the Great Reduction more anon.
CHAPTER VI
More Anon
Well, I made up my mind, having tried violent exercise in the
gymnasium, coupled with violent language in the steam room, and
having found neither or both had been of the least avail in trimming
down my proportions, but on the contrary had augmented them to the
extent of nearly ten pounds, live weight, that I would let well enough
alone. If 'twere my ordained fate to be fat--why, then so be it; I'd be
fatly fatalistic and go on through life undulating and rippling. If an
all-wise Providence meant to call me to the estate of being the bulkiest
writing man using the English language for a vehicle, then let Hilaire
Belloc look to his laurels and Gilbert K. Chesterton to his unholsterings.
There was one consolation: Thank heavens the championship would

remain in America!
The years go marching by in ordered processional. A great war bursts
and for a space endures. In our own land prohibition is nationally
enacted and women's suffrage comes to be, and Irving Berlin, reading
the signs of the times, decides to write The Blue Laws Blues. Fashions
of thought change; other fashions, also. A girl who was born without
hips or eyebrows and who in childhood was regarded as a freak, now
finds herself, at the age of eighteen, exactly in the mode, thus proving
that all things come to those who wait. Czecho-Slovakia is discovered.
The American forces spent three days taking Château-Thierry and three
years trying to learn to pronounce it. Ireland undertakes to settle her
ancient problem on the basis of self-extermination. Several rich retail
profiteers die, the approval being hearty and general, and on arriving at
heaven experience great difficulty in passing through the Needle's Eye,
or tradesmen's entrance. Somebody tells Henry Ford about what some
high priests did in Jerusalem nearly two thousand years ago and in the
first flush of his startled indignation he becomes violently anti-Semitic.
General Pershing returns from the battlefields of Europe universally
acclaimed a model of