Round the Block | Page 5

lips, and hands, incipient folds in the chin, and a prevalent
swollen appearance over all of Matthew Maltboy that the artist
permitted the sun to copy.
Portraits of Maltboy for a series of years would have proved a valuable
contribution to human knowledge, as showing the steady and
remarkable changes through which a man who is doomed to be fat
passes onward to his destiny. But Maltboy stopped sitting for portraits
when he reached the age of twenty, deciding, as many another public
character has done, to transmit only the earlier and more ethereal
representations of himself to posterity.
By some compensating law of Nature, there were given to Maltboy a
light and cheerful heart, a tendency to laugh on the smallest
provocation, and a nice susceptibility to the beautiful. Not the beautiful
in rivers, forests, skies, and other inanimate things, but the beautiful in
woman. And as Overtop was gifted to discover charms in material
objects which were plain in other eyes, so Maltboy possessed the
wonderful faculty of seeing beauty in female faces, where other people
saw, perhaps, only a bad nose, dull eyes, and a pinched-up mouth. This
mental endowment might have been a priceless gift to a portrait painter,

who was desirous of gratifying his sitters; but it was for Matthew
Maltboy a fatal possession. It had led him to love too many women too
much at first sight, and to shift his admiration from one dear object to
another with a suddenness and rapidity destructive to a well-ordered
state of society.
Though these multiplied transfers of affection occasionally caused
some disappointment among the victims of Mr. Maltboy's inconstancy,
it was wisely ordained that he should be the principal sufferer--that
every new passion should involve him in new difficulties, and subject
him to a degree of mental distress which would have reduced the flesh
of any man not hopelessly predisposed to fatness. As Mr. Matthew
Maltboy stood by the fire, he was not taking the profitable retrospective
view of his life which he should have taken, but was glancing with an
expression of concern at the circumference of a showy vest pattern
which cut off the view of his legs.
The apartment in which the three bachelors were keeping a meditative
silence, was large, square, high, on the first floor back, commanding an
ample prospect of neglected rear yards, and all the strange things that
are usually huddled into those strictly private domains. The furniture of
the room was rich and substantial, but not too good to be used. The
chairs were none of those frail, slippery structures of horsehair and
mahogany so inhospitably cold to the touch; but they were oak, high
backed, deep, long armed, softly but stoutly cushioned with leather, and
yawned to receive nodding tenants and send them comfortably to sleep
amid the fragrant clouds of the after-dinner pipe or cigar.
At one end of the room was Marcus Wilkeson's library, consisting of
about five hundred volumes, of poems, novels, travels by land and sea,
histories, and biographies, which the owner dogmatically held to be all
the books in the world worth reading. The admission of a new book to
this select company of standard worthies, Mr. Wilkeson was vain
enough to regard as a high compliment to the author, and as a final
settlement of any disputes which might have been abroad as to its
merits.
On another side of the room was a grand piano, open, and covered with

the latest music, and sometimes played on in a surprisingly graceful
manner by the fat fingers of Matthew Maltboy. On the walls hung some
pictures, that were not unpleasant to look at. There were two portraits
of danseuses, with little gauzy wings, and wands tipped with magic
stars; one large, full-faced likeness of a pet actress, taken in just the
right attitude to show the rounding shoulders, the lightly poised head,
and the heavy hair, to the best advantage; some charming French prints,
among them "Niobe and her Daughters" and "Di Vernon;" and a half
dozen pictures of the fine old English stage-coach days. Over the
fireplace were suspended several pairs of boxing gloves, garnishing the
picture of a tall fellow in fighting attitude, whose prodigious muscles
were only a little smaller than those of all the saints and angels of all
the accredited masterpieces of ancient art. A pair of foils and masks,
neatly arranged over each corner of the mantelpiece, completed the
decorations of the room.
The three bachelors had gone into housekeeping by way of experiment,
as a relief from the tedium and oppression of hotels and boarding
houses, and as an escape from female society, which was beginning to
pall even upon the huge appetite of Matthew Maltboy.
But two weeks of this self-imposed exile--with no female society but