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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of One Third Off, by Irvin S. Cobb
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: One Third Off
+
+Author: Irvin S. Cobb
+
+Illustrator: Tony Sarg
+
+Release Date: July 4, 2005 [EBook #16197]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ONE THIRD OFF ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Bryan Ness, Melissa Er-Raqabi and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+_One Third Off_
+
+
+
+
+_By Irvin S. Cobb_
+
+_Fiction_
+
+FROM PLACE TO PLACE
+THOSE TIMES AND THESE
+LOCAL COLOR
+OLD JUDGE PRIEST
+BACK HOME
+THE ESCAPE OF MR. TRIMM
+
+_Wit and Humor_
+
+ONE THIRD OFF
+A PLEA FOR OLD CAP COLLIER
+THE ABANDONED FARMERS
+THE LIFE OF THE PARTY
+EATING IN TWO OR THREE LANGUAGES
+"OH WELL, YOU KNOW HOW WOMEN ARE!"
+FIBBLE D.D.
+"SPEAKING OF OPERATIONS--"
+EUROPE REVISED
+ROUGHING IT DE LUXE
+COBB'S BILL OF FARE
+COBB'S ANATOMY
+
+_Miscellany_
+
+THE THUNDERS OF SILENCE
+THE GLORY OF THE COMING
+PATHS OF GLORY
+"SPEAKING OF PRUSSIANS--"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+_New York_
+
+_George H. Doran Company_
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: I WEIGHED MYSELF AND IN THE BOX SCORE CREDITED MYSELF WITH
+A PROFOUND SHOCK. _Frontispiece_]
+
+
+
+
+_One Third Off_
+
+_By_
+
+_Irvin S. Cobb_
+
+_Author of_
+_"Old Judge Priest," "Speaking_
+_of Operations--" Etc._
+
+_Illustrated by Tony Sarg_
+
+_New York_
+
+_George H. Doran Company_
+
+
+
+
+_Copyright, 1921,_
+
+_By George H. Doran Company_
+
+_Copyright, 1921,_
+
+_By The Curtis Publishing Company_
+
+_Printed in the United States of America_
+
+
+
+
+_One Third Off_
+
+TO
+HARRY M. STEVENS, ESQUIRE
+WHO IN TIMES GONE BY HELPED ME
+PUT THAT ONE THIRD ON
+
+
+
+
+_CONTENTS_
+
+
+CHAPTER ONE:                                         PAGE
+_Extra! Extra! All About the Great Reduction_     15
+
+CHAPTER TWO:
+_Those Romping Elfin Twenties_                    25
+
+CHAPTER THREE:
+_Regarding Liver-Eating Watkins and Others_       31
+
+CHAPTER FOUR:
+_I Become the Panting Champion_                   41
+
+CHAPTER FIVE:
+_On Acquiring Some Snappy Pores_                  55
+
+CHAPTER SIX:
+_More Anon_                                       65
+
+CHAPTER SEVEN:
+_Office Visits, $10_                              75
+
+CHAPTER EIGHT:
+_The Friendly Sons of the Boiled Spinach_         95
+
+CHAPTER NINE:
+_The Fallen Egg_                                 111
+
+CHAPTER TEN:
+_Wherein Our Hero Falters_                       121
+
+CHAPTER ELEVEN:
+_Three Cheers for Lithesome Grace Regained_      145
+
+
+
+
+ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+I weighed myself and in the box score
+credited myself with a profound shock  _Frontispiece_
+
+"64 Broad"                                             19
+
+To observe Mr. Bryan breakfasting is a
+sight worth seeing                                     45
+
+"You are now registering the preliminary
+warnings--"                                            87
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+_Extra! Extra! All About The Great Reduction!_
+
+
+The way I look at this thing is this way: If something happens to you and
+by writing about it you can make a bit of money and at the same time be a
+benefactor to the race, then why not? Does not the philanthropic aspect of
+the proposition more than balance off the mercenary side? I hold that it
+does, or at least that it should, in the estimation of all fair-minded
+persons. It is to this class that I particularly address myself.
+Unfair-minded persons are advised to take warning and stop right here with
+the contemporary paragraph. That which follows in this little volume is
+not for them.
+
+An even stronger motive impels me. In hereinafter setting forth at length
+and in detail the steps taken by me in making myself thin, or, let us
+say, thinner, I am patterning after the tasteful and benevolent examples
+of some of the most illustrious ex-fat men of letters in our country. Take
+Samuel G. Blythe now. Mr. Blythe is the present international bant-weight
+champion. There was a time, though, when he was what the world is pleased
+to call over-sized. In writing on several occasions, and always
+entertainingly and helpfully, upon the subject of the methods employed by
+him to reduce himself to his current proportions I hold that he had the
+right idea about it.
+
+Getting fat is a fault; except when caused by the disease known as
+obesity, it is a bad habit. Getting thin and at the same time retaining
+one's health is a virtue. Never does the reductionist feel quite so
+virtuous as when for the first time, perhaps in decades, he can stand
+straight up and look straight down and behold the tips of his toes. His
+virtue is all the more pleasant to him because it recalls a reformation on
+his part and because it has called for self-denial. I started to say that
+it had called for mortification of the flesh, but I shan't. Despite the
+contrary opinions of the early fathers of the church, I hold that the
+mortification 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 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 the space of a paragraph or
+so from the main theme, I am reminded of the incident through which a
+certain picturesque gentleman of the early days in California acquired a
+name which he was destined to wear forever after, and under which his
+memory is still affectionately encysted in the traditions of our great Far
+West. I refer to the late Liver-Eating Watkins. Mr. Watkins entered into
+active life and passed through a good part of it bearing the
+unilluminative and commonplace first name of Elmer or Lemuel, or perhaps
+it was Jasper. Just which one of these or some other I forgot now, but no
+matter; at least it was some such. One evening a low-down
+terra-cotta-colored Piute swiped two of Mr. Watkins' paint ponies and by
+stealth, under cover of the cloaking twilight, went away with them into
+the far mysterious spaces of the purpling sage.
+
+To these ponies the owner was deeply attached, not alone on account of the
+intrinsic value, but for sentimental reasons likewise. So immediately on
+discovering the loss the next morning, Mr. Watkins took steps. He saddled
+a third pony which the thief had somehow overlooked in the haste of
+departure, and he girded on him both cutlery and shootlery, and he mounted
+and soon was off and away across the desert upon the trail of the vanished
+malefactor. Now when Mr. Watkins fared forth thus accoutered it was a sign
+he was not out for his health or anybody else's.
+
+Friends and well-wishers volunteered to accompany him upon the chase, for
+they foresaw brisk doings. But he declined their company. Folklore,
+descending from his generation to ours, has it that he said this was his
+own business and he preferred handling it alone in his own way. He did
+add, however, that on overtaking the fugitive it was his intention, as an
+earnest or token of his displeasure, to eat that Injun's liver raw. Some
+versions say he mentioned liver rare, but the commonly accepted legend has
+it that the word used was _raw_. With this he put the spur to his steed's
+flank and was soon but a mere moving speck in the distance.
+
+Now there was never offered any direct proof that our hero, in pursuance
+of his plan for teaching the Indian a lesson, actually did do with regard
+to the latter's liver what he had promised the bystanders he would do;
+moreover, touching on this detail he ever thereafter maintained a
+steadfast and unbreakable silence. In lieu of corroborative testimony by
+unbiased witnesses as to the act itself, we have only these two things to
+judge by: First, that when Mr. Watkins returned in the dusk of the same
+day he was wearing upon his face a well-fed, not to say satiated,
+expression, yet had started forth that morning with no store of
+provisions; and second, that on being found in a deceased state some days
+later, the Piute, who when last previously seen had with him two of Mr.
+Watkin's pintos and one liver of his own, was now shy all three. By these
+facts a strong presumptive case having been made out, Mr. Watkins was
+thenceforth known not as Ezekiel or Emanuel, or whatever his original
+first name had been, but as Liver-Eating, or among friends by the
+affectionate diminutive of Liv for short.
+
+This I would regard as a typical instance of the value of a chain of good
+circumstantial evidence, with no essential link lacking. Direct testimony
+could hardly have been more satisfactory, all things considered; and yet
+direct testimony is the best sort there is, in the law courts and out. On
+the other hand, hearsay evidence is viewed legally and often by the layman
+with suspicion; in most causes of action being barred out altogether.
+Nevertheless, it is a phase of the fattish man's perversity that,
+rejecting the direct, the circumstantial and the circumferential testimony
+which abounds about him, he too often awaits confirmation of his growing
+suspicions at the hands of outsiders and bystanders before he is willing
+openly to admit that condition of fatness which for long has been patent
+to the most casual observer.
+
+Women, as I have observed them, are even more disposed to avoid confession
+on this point. A woman somehow figures that so long as she refuses to
+acknowledge to herself or any other interested party that she has
+progressed out of the ranks of the plumpened into the congested and
+overflowing realms of the avowedly obese, why, for just so long may she
+keep the rest of the world in ignorance too. I take it, the ostrich which
+first set the example to all the other ostriches of trying to avoid
+detection by the enemy through the simple expedient of sticking its head
+in the sand was a lady ostrich, and moreover one typical of her sex. But
+men are bad enough. I know that I was.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+_I Become The Panting Champion_
+
+
+Month after month, through the cycle of the revolving seasons, I went
+along deceiving myself, even though I deceived none else, coining new
+pleas in extenuation or outright contradictions to meet each new-arising
+element of confirmatory proof to a state of case which no unprejudiced
+person could fail to acknowledge. The original discoverer of the alibi was
+a fat man; indeed, it was named for him--Ali Bi-Ben Adhem, he was, a
+friend and companion of the Prophet, and so large that, going into Mecca,
+he had to ride on two camels. This fact is historically authenticated. I
+looked it up.
+
+In the fall of the year, when I brought last winter's heavy suit out of
+the clothes-press and found it now to hug o'ersnugly for comfort, I
+cajoled my saner self into accepting a most transparent lie--my figure had
+not materially altered through the intervening spring and summer; it was
+only that the garments, being fashioned of a shoddy material, had shrunk.
+I owned a dress suit which had been form fitting, 'tis true, but none too
+close a fit upon me. I had owned it for years; I looked forward to owning
+and using it for years to come. I laid it aside for a period during an
+abatement in formal social activities; then bringing it forth from its
+camphor-ball nest for a special occasion I found I could scarce force my
+way down into the trousers, and that the waistcoat buttons could not be
+made to meet the buttonholes, and that the coat, after finally I had
+struggled into it, bound me as with chains by reason of the pull at
+armpits and between the shoulders. I could not get my arms down to my
+sides at all. I could only use them flapper fashion.
+
+I felt like a penguin. I imagine I looked a good bit like one too.
+
+But I did not blame myself, who was the real criminal, or the grocer who
+was accessory before the fact. I put the fault on the tailor, who was
+innocent. Each time I had to let my belt buckle out for another notch in
+order that I might breathe I diagnosed the trouble as a touch of what
+might be called Harlem flatulency. We lived in a flat then--a nonelevator
+flat--and I pretended that climbing three flights of steep stairs was what
+developed my abdominal muscles and at the same time made me short of wind.
+
+I coined a new excuse after we had moved to a suburb back of Yonkers.
+Frequently I had to run to catch the 5:07 accommodation, because if I
+missed it I might have to wait for the 7:05, which was no accommodation. I
+would go jamming my way at top speed toward the train gate and on into the
+train shed, and when I reached my car I would be 'scaping so emphatically
+that the locomotive on up ahead would grow jealous and probably felt as
+though it might just as well give up trying to compete in volume of sound
+output with a real contender. But I was agile enough for all purposes and
+as brisk as any upon my feet. Therein I found my consolation.
+
+Among all my fellow members of the younger Grand Central Station set there
+was scarce a one who could start with me at scratch and beat me to a train
+just pulling out of the shed; and even though he might have bested me at
+sprinting, I had him whipped to a soufflé at panting. In a hundred-yard
+dash I could spot anyone of my juniors a dozen pairs of pants and win out
+handily. I was the acknowledged all-weights panting champion of the Putnam
+division.
+
+[Illustration: TO OBSERVE MR. BRYAN BREAKFASTING IS A SIGHT WORTH SEEING.
+_Page 45_]
+
+If there had been ten or twelve of my neighbors as good at this as I was
+we might have organized and drilled together and worked out a class cheer
+for the Putnam Division Country Club--three deep long pants, say,
+followed by nine sharp short pants or pantlets. But I would have been
+elected pants leader without a struggle. My merits were too self-evident
+for a contest.
+
+But did I attribute my supremacy in this regard to accumulating and
+thickening layers of tissue in the general vicinity of my midriff? I did
+not! No, sir, because I was fat--indubitably, uncontrovertibly and beyond
+the peradventure of a doubt, fat--I kept on playing the fat man's game of
+mental solitaire. I inwardly insisted, and I think partly believed, that
+my lung power was too great for the capacity of my throat opening, 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, and I had written copiously of those joys, and I now
+declined to recant of my faith or to abate my indulgences.
+
+All this talk which I had heard about balanced rations went in at one ear
+and out at the other. I knew what a balanced ration was. I stowed one
+aboard three times daily--at morn, again at noon and once more at
+nightfall. A balanced ration was one which, being eaten, did not pull you
+over on your face; one which you could poise properly if only you leaned
+well back, upon arising from the table, and placed the two hands, with a
+gentle lifting motion, just under the overhang of the main cargo hold.
+
+Surely there must be some way of achieving the desired result other than
+by following dieting devices. There was--exercising was the answer. I
+would exercise and so become a veritable faun.
+
+Now, so far as I recalled, I had never taken any indoor exercise excepting
+once in a while to knock on wood. I abhorred the thought of ritualistic
+bedroom calisthenics such as were recommended by divers health experts.
+Climbing out of a warm bed and standing out in the middle of a cold room
+and giving an imitation of a demoniac semaphore had never appealed to me
+as a fascinating divertisement for a grown man. As I think I may have
+remarked once before, lying at full length on one's back on the floor
+immediately upon awakening of a morning and raising the legs to full
+length twenty times struck me as a performance lacking in dignity and
+utterly futile.
+
+Besides, what sort of a way was that to greet the dewy morn?
+
+So as an alternative I decided to enroll for membership at a gymnasium
+where I could have company at my exercising and make a sport of what
+otherwise would be in the nature of a punishment. This I did. With a group
+of fellow inmates for my team mates, I tossed the medicine ball about. My
+score at this was perfect; that is to say, sometimes when it came my turn
+to catch I missed the ball, but the ball never once missed me. Always it
+landed on some tender portion of my anatomy, so that my average, written
+in black-and-blue spots, remained an even 1000.
+
+Daily I cantered around and around and around a running track until my
+breathing was such probably as to cause people passing the building to
+think that the West Side Y.M.C.A. was harboring a pet porpoise inside.
+Once, doing this, I caught a glimpse of my own form in a looking-glass
+which for some reason was affixed to one of the pillars flanking the oval.
+A looking-glass properly did not belong there; distinctly it was out of
+place and could serve no worthy purpose. Very few of the sights presented
+in a gym which largely is patronized by city-bred fat men are deserving to
+be mirrored in a glass. They are not such visions as one would care to
+store in fond memory's album. Be that as it may, here was this mirror, and
+swinging down the course suddenly I beheld myself in it. Clad in a
+chastely simple one-piece garment, with my face all a blistered crimson
+and my fingers interlaced together about where the third button of the
+waistcoat, counting from the bottom up, would have been had I been
+wearing any waistcoat, I reminded myself of a badly scorched citizen
+escaping in a scantily dressed condition from a burning homestead bringing
+with him the chief family treasure clasped in his arms. He had saved the
+pianola!
+
+From the running track or the medicine-ball court I would repair to the
+steam room and simmer pleasantly in a temperature of 240 degrees
+Fahrenheit--I am sure I have the figures right--until all I needed before
+being served was to have the gravy slightly thickened with flour and a
+dash of water cress added here and there. Having remained in the steam
+cabinet until quite done, I next would jump into the swimming pool, which
+concluded the afternoon's entertainment.
+
+Jumping into the cool water of the pool was supposed to reseal the pores
+which the treatment in the hot room had caused to open. In the best
+gymnasium circles it is held to be a fine thing to have these educated
+pores, but I am sure it can be overdone, and personally I cannot say that
+I particularly enjoyed it. I kept it up largely for their sake. They
+became highly trained, but developed temperament. They were apt to get the
+signals mixed and open unexpectedly on the street, resulting in bad colds
+for me.
+
+For six weeks, on every week day from three to five P.M. I maintained this
+schedule religiously--at least I used a 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 military
+efficiency and wearing so many medals that alongside him John Philip
+Sousa, by contrast, looks absolutely nude. His friends project him into
+the political arena and the result is summed in a phrase--"Lafayette, he
+ain't there!" Unavailing efforts are made by a rebellious and unreconciled
+few of us to find a presidential candidate willing to run on a platform of
+but four planks, namely: Wines, ales, liquors and cigars. Harding wins,
+Scattering second; Cox also ran: slogan: "He Kept Us Out of McAdoo."
+Manhattan Island, from whence the rest of the country derives its panics,
+its jazz tremblors and its girl shows, develops a severe sinking sensation
+in the pit of its financial stomach, accompanied by acute darting pains
+at the juncture of Broad and Wall. This is the way Thomas Carlyle used to
+start off a new chapter, and I like it. It denotes erudition. Ziegfeld
+builds a new Follies show around twelve pairs of winsome knee joints.
+North Dakota blows down the Nonpartisan League and discovers that darned
+thing was loaded in both barrels. The Prussians are pained to note that
+for some reason or other a number of people seem to harbor a grudge
+against them. Nine thousand Kentucky mint patches are plowed under and the
+sites sown with rosemary; that's for remembrance. In New York plans are
+undertaken for construing the Eighteenth Amendment along the lines of the
+selective draft, upon the theory that booze is a bad thing for some people
+and much too good for many of the others. The word "intrigued" creeps into
+our language and becomes common property, but the fiction writers saw it
+first. A business men's cabinet, composed almost exclusively of
+politicians, succeeds a business men's cabinet composed almost
+exclusively of politicians. In order to hurry along the payment of
+Installment One of the Indemnity France whistles up the reserves and that
+chore is chored. Pessimists, including many of the old-line Democrats,
+practically all the maltsters, and Aunt Emma Goldman, are filled with a
+dismal conviction that creation has gone plum' to perdition in a hand
+basket. Those more optimistically inclined look upon the brighter side of
+things and distill consolation from the thought that nothing is so bad but
+what it might have been worse--Trotzky might have been born twins. Great
+Britain has her post-war industrial crisis, Serial Number 24. The Sinn
+Féin enlarges the British national anthem to read God Save the King Till
+We Can Get at Him! By a strict party vote Congress decides the share in
+the victory achieved by the A.E.F. was overwhelmingly Republican, but that
+the airship program went heavily Democratic. Popular distrust of
+home-brew recipes assumes a nationwide phase. This brings us up to the
+early spring of this year of grace, 1921, which is what I have been aiming
+for all through this paragraph.
+
+Quite without warning, I discovered along about the first of March that
+something ailed me; something was rocking the boat. About my heart there
+was a sense of pressure, so it seemed to me, or else my imagination was at
+fault. Mentally, I found myself--well, for lack of a better word to
+express it--logy. Otherwise, in all physical regards, I felt as brisk and
+peart as ever I have, despite the circumstance of having reached the age
+when a great many of us are confronted by the distressing discovery that
+we are rapidly getting no younger.
+
+Now when a man who has always enjoyed such outrageously perfect health as
+it has been my good fortune to enjoy takes note that certain nagging
+manifestations are persisting within him it is his duty, or least it
+should be his duty, to try to find out the underlying cause of whatever
+it is that distresses him and correct the trouble before it becomes
+chronic.
+
+I did not get frightened--I trust I am not a self-alarmist--but I did get
+worried. I made up my mind that I would not wait, as those who approach
+middle age so often do, for the medical examiner of an insurance company
+to scare me into sudden conniption fits. But I also made up my mind that I
+would find out what radically was wrong with me, if anything, and endeavor
+to master it while the mastering was good.
+
+This, though, was after I had harked back to the days of my adolescence. I
+was born down on the northern edge of the southern range of the North
+American malaria belt; and when I was growing up, if one seemed
+intellectually torpid or became filled with an overpowering bodily
+languor, the indisposition always was diagnosed offhand as a touch of
+malaria. Accordingly, the victim, taking his own advice or another's,
+jolted his liver with calomel until the poor thing flinched every time a
+strange pill was seen approaching it, and then he rounded out the course
+of treatment with all the quinine the traffic would stand. Recalling these
+early campaigns, I borrowed of their strategy for use against my present
+symptoms--if symptoms they were. I took quinine until my ears rang so that
+persons passing me on the public highway would halt to listen to the
+chimes. My head was filled with mysterious muffled rumblings. It was like
+living in a haunted house and being one at the same time.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+_Office Visits, $10_
+
+
+It required all of two weeks of experimenting with my interior to convince
+me that whatever it might be that annoyed me, it surely was not a thing
+which an intensive bombardment of the liver would cure. The liver has a
+low visibility but is easy to hit.
+
+I had the aversion to seeking professional guidance for the curing of a
+presumably minor disorder that most robust male adults have. In personal
+tribute I may add that I have never been hypochondriac in any possible
+respect. However, toward the end of those three weeks I formed the
+decision that I would go to see a doctor or so. But I would sneak up on
+these gentlemen, so to speak. I would call upon them in the rôle of a
+friend rather than avowedly as a prospective patient, and take them into
+my confidence, as it were, by degrees. Somewhere in the back part of my
+brain I nursed a persistent fear that my complaints might be diagnosed as
+symptoms of that incurable malady known as being forty-four years old,
+going, on forty-five. And I knew that much already without paying a
+physician twenty-five dollars for telling me so the first time and ten
+dollars for each time he told it to me over again.
+
+Rather shamefacedly, with a well-simulated air of casualness, I dropped in
+upon a physician who is a friend of mine and in whose judgment I have
+confidence; and then, after a two-day interval, I went to see a second
+physician of my acquaintance who, I believe, also thoroughly knows his
+trade. With both men I followed the same tactics--roundabout chatting on
+the topic of this or that, and finally an honest confession as to the real
+purpose of my visit. In both instances the results were practically
+identical. Each man manifested an almost morbid curiosity touching on my
+personal habits and bodily idiosyncrasies. Each asked me a lot of
+questions. Each went at me with X-ray machines and blood tests and
+chemical analysissies--if there isn't any such word I claim there should
+be--until my being was practically an open book to him and I had no
+secrets left at all.
+
+And the upshot of all this was that each of them told me that though
+organically I was as sound as a nut in fact much sounder than some of the
+nuts they knew professionally--I was carrying an overload of avoirdupois
+about with me. In other words, I was too fat for my own good. I was eating
+too much sweet stuff and entirely too much starch--especially starch. They
+agreed on this point emphatically. As well as I could gather, I was
+subjecting my interior to that highly shellacked gloss which is peculiar
+to the bosom of the old-fashioned full-dress or burying shirt upon its
+return from the steam laundry, when what my system really called for was
+the dull domestic finish.
+
+"Well, doc," I said upon hearing this for the second time in language
+which already had a familiar sound--"well, all that you say being true,
+what then?"
+
+"For one thing, more exercise."
+
+"But I take plenty of exercise now."
+
+"For example, what?"
+
+"For example, golf."
+
+"How often do you play golf?"
+
+"Well, not so very often, as the real golf-bug or caddie's worm would
+measure the thing--say, on an average of once a week in the golfing
+season. But I take so many swings at the ball before hitting it that I
+figure I get more exercise out of the game than do those who play oftener
+but take only about one wallop at the pill in driving off. And when I
+drive into the deep grass, as is my wont, my work with the niblick would
+make you think of somebody bailing out a sinking boat. My bunker exercises
+are frequently what you might call violent. And in the fall of the year I
+do a lot of tramping about in the woods with a gun. I might add that on a
+hunting trip I can walk many a skinny person into a state of total
+exhaustion." I stated this last pridefully.
+
+"All right for that, then," he said. "We'll concede that you get an
+abundance of exercise. Then there is another thing you should do, and of
+the two this is by far the more essential--you should go on a diet."
+
+Right there I turned mentally rebellious. I wanted to reduce my bulk, but
+I did not want to reduce my provender. I offered counter-arguments in
+defense. I pointed but that for perhaps five years past my weight
+practically had been stationary. Also I called attention to the fact that
+I no longer ate so heavily as once I had. Not that I wished actually to
+decry my appetite. It had been a good friend to me and not for worlds
+would I slander it. I have a sincere conviction that age cannot wither nor
+custom stale my infinite gastric juices. Never, I trust, will there come a
+time when I shan't relish my victuals or when I'll feel disinclined to
+chase the last fugitive bite around and around the plate until I overtake
+it. But I presented the claim, which was quite true, that I was not the
+consumer, measured by volume, I once had been. Perhaps my freighterage
+spaces, with passing years, had grown less expansive or less accommodating
+or something.
+
+Likewise, I invited his consideration of the fact, which was not to be
+gainsaid either, that many men very much less elaborated than I in girth
+customarily ate very much more than I did. I recalled, offhand, sundry
+conspicuous examples of this sort. I believe I mentioned one or two such.
+For instance, now, there was Mr. William Jennings Bryan. The Bryan
+appetite, as I remarked to the doctor, is one of the chief landmarks of
+Mr. Bryan's home city of Lincoln, Nebraska. They take the sight-seeing
+tourists around to have a look at it, the first thing.
+
+To observe Mr. Bryan breakfasting on the morning when a national
+Democratic convention is in session is a sight worth seeing. A double
+order of cantaloupes on the half shell, a derby hat full of oatmeal, a
+rosary of sausages, and about as many flapjacks as would be required to
+tessellate the floor of a fair-sized reception hall is nothing at all for
+him. And when he has concluded his meal he gets briskly up and strolls
+around to the convention hall and makes a better speech and a longer one
+and a louder pile than anybody. Naturally, time, the insatiable remodeler,
+has worked some outward changes in Mr. Bryan since the brave old days of
+the cross of gold. His hair, chafed by the constant pressure of the halo,
+has retreated up and ever up his scalp until the forehead extends clear
+over and down upon the sunset slope. The little fine wrinkles are thickly
+smocked at the corners of the eagle eyes that flashed so fiercely at the
+cringing plutocrats.
+
+But his bearing is just as graceful and his voice just as silvery and as
+strong as when in '96 he advocated free silver to save the race, or when
+he advocated anti-expansion in the Philippines, or government ownership
+of the railroads, or a policy of nonpreparedness for war when Germany
+first began acting up--Grover Cleveland Bergdoll felt the same way about
+it and so did Ma Bergdoll;--and I, for one, have no doubt that Mr. Bryan
+will be just as supple, mentally and physically, three years hence when,
+if he runs true to form, he will be advocating yet another of that series
+of those immemorial Jeffersonian principles of the fathers, which he
+thinks up, to order, right out of his own head, when a campaign impends.
+Mr. Bryan knows how to play the political game--none better; but he
+certainly does have a large discard. That, however, is aside from the main
+issue.
+
+The point I sought to bring out there in the office of my friend Doctor
+So-and-so was that Mr. Bryan, to my knowledge, ate what he craved and all
+that he craved, yet did not become obese. When the occasion demanded he
+could be amply bellicose, but the accent was not upon the first two
+syllables.
+
+I cited similar cases further to buttress my position. I told him that
+almost the skinniest human being I ever knew had been one of the largest
+eaters. I was speaking now of John Wesley Bass, the champion raw-egg eater
+of Massac Precinct, whose triumphant career knew not pause or discomfiture
+until one day at the McCracken County fair when suddenly tragedy dire
+impended.
+
+He did not overextend himself in the gustatory line--that to one of John
+Wesley Bass' natural gifts and attainments well-nigh would have been
+impossible; but he betrayed a lack of caution when, having broken his
+former record by eating thirty-six raw eggs at a sitting, he climbed upon
+a steam merry-go-round, shortly thereafter falling off the spotted wooden
+giraffe which he rode, and being removed to the city hospital in an
+unconscious condition.
+
+That night later when the crisis had passed the doctors said that as
+nearly as they could figure out a case so unusual, Mr. Bass had had a
+very close call from being just naturally scrambled to death. I spoke at
+length of my former fellow townsman's powers, dwelling heavily upon the
+fact that, despite all, he never thickened up at the waistline. Throughout
+the narrative, however, the doctor punctuated my periods with derisive
+snorts which were disconcerting to an orderly presentation of the facts.
+Nevertheless, I continued until I had reached what I regarded as a telling
+climax.
+
+"Piffle!" he rejoined. "One hoarse raucous piffle and three sharp decisive
+puffs for your arguments! I tell you that what ails you is this: You are
+now registering, the preliminary warnings of obesity. The danger is not
+actually here yet; but for you Nature already has set the danger signals.
+There's a red light on the switch for one I. Cobb. You are due before a
+great while for a head-end collision with your own health. You can take my
+advice or you can let it alone. That's entirely up to you. Only don't
+blame me if you come back here some day all telescoped up amidships.
+
+"And please don't consume time which is reasonably valuable to me, however
+lightly you may regard it, by telling me now about slim men who eat more
+than you do and yet keep their figures. The woods are full of them; also
+the owl wagons. The difference between such men as those you have
+described and such men as you is that they were made to be thin men and to
+keep on being thin men regardless of their food consumption, and that your
+sort are naturally predisposed to fatness. You can't judge their cases by
+yours any more than you can judge the blood-sweating behemoth of Holy Writ
+by the plans and specifications of the humble earwig.
+
+"One man's meat is another man's poison; that's a true saying. And here's
+another saying--one cannot eat his cake and have it, too. But that's an
+error so far as you are concerned. The trouble with you is that when you
+eat your cake you still have it--in layers of fat. If you want to get rid
+of the layers you'll have to cut out the cake, or most of it, anyway. Must
+I make you a diagram, or is this plain enough for your understanding?"
+
+It was--abundantly. But I still had one more bright little idea waiting in
+the second-line trenches. I called up the reserves.
+
+"Ahem!" I said. "Well now, old man, how about trying some of these
+electrical treatments or these chemicalized baths or these remedies I see
+advertised? I was reading only the other day where one successful operator
+promised on his word of honor to take off flesh for anybody, no matter who
+it was, without interfering with that person's table habits and customs."
+
+My friend can be very plain-spoken when the spirit moves him.
+
+[Illustration: "YOU ARE NOW REGISTERING THE PRELIMINARY
+WARNINGS--" _Page 87_]
+
+"Say, listen to me," he snapped, "or better still, you'd better write down
+what I'm about to say and stick it in your hat where you can find it and
+consult it when your mind begins wandering again. Those special
+mechanical devices to reduce fat people are contrived for the benefit of
+men and lazy women who are too slothful to take exercise or else too
+besotted in the matter of food indulgence to face the alternative of
+dieting. They may not do any harm--properly operated, they probably do
+not--but, at best, I would regard them as being merely temporary
+expedients specially devised as first aid to the incurably lazy.
+
+"And as for pills and boluses and bottled goods guaranteed to reduce your
+weight, and as for all these patented treatments and proprietary
+preparations which you see boosted in the papers--bah! Either they are
+harmless mixtures, in which event they'll probably do you no serious
+injury, but will certainly do you no real good; or else they contain drugs
+which, taken to excess, may cut you down in size, but have the added
+drawback of very probably cutting short your life.
+
+"No, sir-ree! For you it's dieting, now and from now on. You may be able
+to relax your diet in time, but you can never altogether forego it. Give
+us this day our daily diet--that's your proper prayer. And you'd better
+start praying pretty soon, too!"
+
+"All right, doc," I said resignedly. "You've practically converted me. I
+can't say I'm happy over the prospect, but if you say so I'm prepared to
+become a true believer. But since, between us, we're about to take all the
+joy out of life, let's be thorough. What must I do to be saved? Give me
+the horrible details right here. I might as well hear the worst at one
+session."
+
+"I'm no dietitian," he said. "I don't profess to be one. That's not my
+line--my line is the diagnostic. Of course I could lay down a few broad
+general rules for your guidance--any experienced practitioner could do
+that--but to get the best returns you should consult a diet specialist.
+However, in parting--I have several paying guests waiting for me and we
+are now about to part--I will throw in one more bit of advice without
+charge. No matter what suggestions you may get from any quarter, I would
+urge you not to follow any banting formula so rigorous as to take off your
+superfluous flesh very rapidly. Take your time about it. If you live as
+long as both of us hope you may you'll have plenty of time. There's no
+rush, so go at it gradually. Be regular about it, but don't be too
+ambitious at the outset. Don't try to turn yourself into a tricky sprite
+in two weeks. For a fat man too abruptly to strip the flesh off his bones
+I regard as dangerous. It weakens him and depletes his powers of
+resistance and makes him fair game for any stray microbe which may be
+cruising about looking for a place to set up housekeeping."
+
+At first blush it might appear to the lay mind that a germ would scarcely
+care to pick a bone when it had fat meat to feed on, but my own
+recollections bore out my friend's statements. I remembered a man of my
+acquaintance, an enormously fleshy and unwieldy man, who, fearing
+apoplexy, undertook a radical scheme of banting. He lost fifty pounds in
+three months, so apoplexy did not get him, but pneumonia did with great
+suddenness. He was sick only three days. Nobody suspected that he was
+seriously ill until the third day, when suddenly he just hauled off and
+died.
+
+So I promised to have a care against seeking to hurry myself right out of
+the flounder class and right into the smelt division.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+_The Friendly Sons of the Boiled Spinach_
+
+
+My friend gave me the names of several men of acknowledged standing and
+told me I should be making no mistake did I put myself in the hands of any
+one on the list. I thanked him and departed from his presence. To the
+casual eye I may have seemed, going away, to be in high spirits; but,
+confidentially, I wasn't feeling so very brash. My spirits were low. I had
+heard the truth--I made no effort to deceive myself there--but the truth
+was painful.
+
+Still, knowing what I should do, I hesitated, temporizing with myself. I
+gave a couple of days of intensive meditation to the subject, and then I
+reached this conclusion: I would read a few standard and orthodox works
+on dietetics, and, so doing, try to arrive at least at a superficial
+knowledge of the matter. Also, I would balance what one recognized
+authority said as against what another recognized authority said, and
+then, before going to a specialist, I would do a little personal
+experimenting with my diet and mark the effects.
+
+I arrived at this decision privately, taking no one into my confidence.
+And without an intent to deprive any hard-worked specialist of a
+prospective fee, I shall ever continue to believe that the second part of
+the course I chose to follow was a wise one. It might not serve my
+brother-in-obesity, but it served me well. I'm sure of that.
+
+But the first part of the system naturally came first. This had to do with
+research work among the best authorities. Here I struck one of the snags
+that rise in the pathway of the hardy soul who goes adventuring into any
+given department of the science of medicine and its allied sciences. I was
+pained to observe how rare it was for two experts, of whatsoever period,
+to agree upon a single essential element. An amateur investigator was left
+at a loss to fathom why such entirely opposite conclusions should have
+been arrived at by the members of the same school when presumably both had
+had the same raw materials to work on. By their raw materials I mean their
+patients. But so it was.
+
+The ancient apostles of dietetics, the original pathfinders into a
+hitherto untracked field, had disciples who set out to follow in their
+footsteps, but before they had traveled very far along the alimentary
+trail the disciples were quarreling bitterly with the masters' deductions
+and conclusions. To-day's school was snooty touching on the major opinions
+of yesterday's crowd, and to-morrow's crowd already made faces at
+to-day's.
+
+On just two points I found a unanimity of opinion among what might be
+termed the middle group of dietetic explorers as counter-distinguished
+from the pioneering cult and the modern or comparatively modern. Each one
+was so absolutely certain that he was so absolutely right and so
+absolutely certain that all his contemporaries were so absolutely wrong.
+
+At the beginning, it seemed, a reduction of the sufferer's flesh had been
+attempted by the simple device of bleeding him copiously--not with a
+monthly statement, as latterly, but with a lancet. Abundant drinking of
+vinegar also had been recommended as a means to accomplish the desired
+end. They were noble drinkers in the olden times, but until I began
+delving into literature of the subject I did not suspect that there had
+been any out-and-out vinegar topers.
+
+There was citation in an early work of the interesting case of the Marquis
+of Cortona, a subchieftain under the Duke of Alva, and a fine fat old
+butcher he must have been, too, by all tellings. Finding himself grown so
+rotund that no longer could he enter with zest into the massacre bees and
+torture outings which the Spaniards were carrying on in the harried
+Netherlands, the marquis had recourse to vinegar; and so efficacious was
+the treatment that, as the tradition runs, he soon could wrap his loosened
+skin about him in great slack folds like a cloak, and thus, close-reefed,
+go merrily murdering his way across the Low Countries.
+
+One pictures the advantages accruing. In cold weather, now, he might
+overlap his wrinkles in a clapboarded effect and save the expense of
+laying in heavy underwear. True, this might give to the wearer a
+clinker-built appearance; still it would keep him nice and warm, and no
+doubt he had his armor on outside the rest of his things. But likewise
+there must have been drawbacks. Suppose, now, the marquis were caught out
+in blowy weather and the wind worked in under his tucks and the ratlines
+pulled loose and, all full-rigged and helpless, bellying and billowing and
+flapping and jibing, he went scudding against his will before the gale.
+Could he hope to tack and go about before he blew clear over into the next
+county? I doubt it.
+
+And suppose he inflated himself for a party or a reception or something,
+and a practical joker put a tack in a chair and he sat down on it and had
+a blow-out. The thought is not a pretty one, yet the thing were possible.
+
+From these crude beginnings I worked my way down toward the present day.
+Doctor Banting, of England, the father of latter-day dietetics from whose
+name in commemoration of his services to mankind we derive the verb
+intransitive "to bant," had theories wherein his chief contemporaneous
+German rival, Epstein the Bavarian, radically disagreed with him. Voit,
+coming along subsequently, disagreed in important details with both. Among
+the moderns I discerned where Dr. Woods Hutchinson had his pet ideas and
+Doctor Wiley had his, diametrically opposed. So it went. There was almost
+as much of disputation here as there is when a federation of women's
+clubs is holding an annual election. It was all so very confusing to one
+aiming to do the right thing.
+
+One learned savant flatly laid down the ultimatum that the individual
+seeking to reduce should cut out all pork products from chitterings clear
+through the list to headcheese and give his undivided support to the red
+meats and the white. One of his brethren was equally positive that I might
+partake of bacon and even ham in moderation, but urged that I walk around
+red meat as though it were a pesthouse. Yet a third--a foe, plainly, to
+the butcher, but a well-wisher to the hay-and-produce dealer if ever one
+lived--recommended that I should eliminate all meat of whatsoever
+character or color and stick closely to fodder, roughage and processed
+ensilage. I judge he sent his more desperate cases to a livery stable.
+
+According to one dictum, bread was all right up to a certain point, and,
+according to another, all wrong. This man here held a brief for beans,
+especially the succulent baked bean; that man yonder served solemn warning
+upon me that if perversely I persisted to continue to eat baked beans the
+fat globules would form so fast I would have the sensation that a little
+boy was inside of me somewhere blowing bubbles. The writer didn't exactly
+say this, but it was the inference I drew from his remarks.
+
+Eat dried fruits until your seams give, said Doctor A. Avoid dried fruits
+as you would the plague, counseled the equally eminent Doctor B. Professor
+C considered the drinking of water with meals highly inadvisable; whereas
+Professor D said that without adding an extra ounce of weight I might
+consume water until my fluid contents sloshed up and down in me when I
+walked, and merely by getting a young lady in Oriental costume to stand
+alongside me I might qualify at a Sunday-school entertainment for the
+entire supporting cast of the familiar tableau entitled Rebecca at the
+Well. He intimated that just so I stopped short of committing suicide as
+an inside job all would be fine and dandy. I do not claim that these were
+his words; this is the free interpretation of his meaning. Sink the knife
+in the butter to the very hilt--there will be no ill effects but only a
+beneficial outcome--declares such-and-such a food faddist. Eschew butter
+by all means or accept the consequences, clarions an earnest voice. Well,
+I never was much of a hand for eschewed butter anyway. We keep our own cow
+and make our own butter and it seems to slip down, just so.
+
+In the vegetable kingdom the controversy raged with unabated fury. The
+boiled prune, blandest and most inoffensive of breakfast dishes, formed
+the basis of a spirited debate. There were pro-prunists and there were
+con-prunists. The parsnip had its champions and its antagonists; the
+carrot its defenders and its assailants. In this quarter was the cabbage
+heartily indorsed, there was it belittled and made naught of. The
+sprightly spring onion, already socially scorned in some of the best lay
+circles, suffered attack at the hands of at least one scientific and
+scholarly professional.
+
+After reading his strictures I remarked to myself that really there
+remained but one field of useful popularity for the onion to adorn; in
+time it might hope to supplant the sunflower as the floral emblem of
+Kansas, as typifying a great political principle which originated in that
+state: The Initiative, when one took a chance and ate a young onion; the
+Referendum, while one's digestive apparatus wrestled with it; the Recall,
+if it disagreed with one. Alone, of all the vegetables, stood spinach,
+with not a single detractor. On this issue the vote in the affirmative
+practically was by acclamation. I am tin position to state that boiled
+spinach has not an enemy among the experts. This seems but fair--it has so
+few friends among the eating public.
+
+I observed much and confusing talk of the value of nitrogens, proteids
+and--when I had reached the ultra-modernists--vitamines. Vitamines, I
+gathered, had only recently been discovered, yet by the progressives they
+were held to be of the supremest importance in the equation of properly
+balanced human sustenance. To my knowledge I had never consciously eaten
+vitamines unless a vitamine was what gave guaranteed strictly fresh string
+beans, as served at a table-d'hôte restaurant, that peculiar flavor. Here
+all along I had figured it was the tinny taste of the can, which shows how
+ignorant one may be touching on vitally important matters. I visualized a
+suitable luncheon for one banting according to the newest and most
+generally approved formula:
+
+=RELISH=
+MIXED GELATINOIDS
+
+=POTAGE=
+STRAINED NITROGEN GUMBO
+
+=ENTREE=
+GRILLED PROTEIDS WITH GLOBULIN PATTIES
+
+=DESSERT=
+COMPOTE OF ASSORTED VITAMINES
+
+Or the alternative course for one sincerely desirous of reducing, who
+believed everything he saw in print, was to cut out all the proscribed
+articles of food--which meant everything edible except spinach--and starve
+gracefully on a diet composed exclusively of boiled spinach, with the
+prospect of dying a dark green death in from three to six weeks and
+providing one's own protective coloration if entombed in a cemetery
+containing cedars.
+
+Personally I was not favorably inclined toward either plan, so I elected
+to let my conscience be my guide, backed by personal observation and
+personal experimentation. I was traveling pretty constantly this past
+spring, and in the smoking compartments of the Pullmans, where all men,
+for some curious reason, grow garrulous and confidential, I put crafty
+leading questions to such of my fellow travelers as were over-sized and
+made mental notes of their answers for my own subsequent use. Since the
+Eighteenth Amendment put the nineteenth hole out of commission,
+prohibition and how to evade it are the commonest of all conversational
+topics among those moving about from place to place in America; but the
+subject of what a man eats, and more particularly what he eats for
+breakfast, runs it a close second for popularity.
+
+For example, there is the seasoned trans-atlantic tourist who, on the
+occasion of a certain terrifically stormy passage, was for three days the
+only person on board excepting the captain who never missed a single meal.
+You find him everywhere; there must be a million or more of him; and he
+loves to talk about it, and he does.
+
+But even more frequently encountered is the veteran drummer--no, beg
+pardon, the veteran district sales manager, for there aren't any drummers
+any more, or even any traveling salesmen; but instead we have district
+sales managers featuring strong selling points--I say, even more
+frequently encountered is the veteran district sales manager, wearing a
+gravy-colored waistcoat if a tasty dresser, or a waistcoat of a
+nongravy-colored or contrasting shade if careless, who craves to tell
+strangers what, customarily, he eats for breakfast.
+
+I made it a point to study the proportions and hearken to the disclosures
+of such a one, and if he carried his stomach in a hanging-garden effect,
+with terraces rippling down and flying buttresses and all; and if he had a
+pasty, unhealthy complexion or an apoplectic tint to his skin I said to
+myself that thenceforth I should apply the reverse English to his favorite
+matutinal prescription.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+_Adventure of The Fallen Egg_
+
+
+So, having mapped out my campaign of attack against my fat, I rose one
+morning from my berth in the sleeping car and I dressed; and firmly
+clutching my new-formed resolution to prevent its escape, I made my way to
+the dining car and sat down and gave my order to the affable honor
+graduate of Tuskegee Institute who graciously deigned to wait on me.
+
+Now, theretofore, for so far back as I remembered, breakfast had been my
+heartiest meal of the entire day, with perhaps two exceptions--luncheon
+and dinner. Precedent inclined me toward ordering about as many pieces of
+sliced banana as would be required to button a fairly tall woman's
+princess frock all the way down her back, with plenty of sugar and cream,
+and likewise a large porringer of some standard glutinous cereal, to be
+followed by sausages with buckwheat cakes and a few odd kickshaws and
+comfits in the way of strawberry preserves and hot buttered toast and
+coffee that was half cream, and first one thing and then another. But
+Spartanlike I put temptation sternly behind me and told the officiating
+collegian to bring me plain boiled prunes, coffee with hot milk and
+saccharin tablets, dry toast and one dropped egg.
+
+The prunes and the coffee were according to specifications, although,
+lacking the customary cream and three lumps of sugar, the coffee was in
+the nature of a profound disappointment. But a superficial inquiry
+convinced me that the egg was not properly a dropped egg at all.
+
+Here was a fallen egg, if I ever saw one. I was filled with pity for
+it--poor, forsaken, abandoned thing, with none to speak a kind word for
+it! And probably more sinned against than sinning, too. Perhaps there was
+hereditary influences to be reckoned with. Perhaps its producer had been
+incubator raised, with no mother to guide her and only the Standard Oil
+Company for a foster parent. And what would a New Jersey corporation know
+about raising a hen?
+
+Thus in sudden compassion I mused. To the waiter, though, I said:
+
+"There has been a mistake here, alumnus. This egg never was meant to be
+dropped--it was meant to be thrown. Kindly remove the melancholy
+evidences."
+
+He offered to provide a substitute, but the edge of my zest seemed dulled.
+I made dry toast the climax of my chastely simple repast. It was simple
+and it was chaste, but otherwise not altogether what I should characterize
+as a successful repast. It lacked, as it were.
+
+Let us pass along to noontime. Ere noontime came I was consumed with
+gnawing pains of emptiness. As nearly as I might judge, I contained naught
+save vast hollow spaces and acoustics and vacuums and empty, echoing,
+neglected convolutions. Sorely was I tempted to relax the rigors of the
+just-inaugurated régime; nobly, though, I resisted the impulse.
+
+As I look back now on that day I find the memory of my suffering has
+dimmed slightly. The passage of weeks and months has served to soften the
+harsh outlines of poignant recollection. What now in retrospect most
+impresses me is the heroism I displayed, the stark fortitude, the grandeur
+of will power, the triumph for character. Sheer gallantry, I call it.
+
+For my midday meal I had more dry toast, a reduced portion of boiled
+tongue and a raw apple--satisfying enough to some, I grant you, but to me
+no more than a tease to my palate. Long before three o'clock I knew
+exactly how a tapeworm feels when its landlord goes on a hunger strike.
+Every salivary gland I owned was standing on tiptoe screaming for help;
+every little mucous membrane had a sorrow all its own. Each separate
+fiber of my innermost being cried out for greases and for sugars and for
+the wonted starchy compounds for to stay it and for to comfort it.
+
+I underwent pangs such as had not been mine since away back yonder in
+August of 1914, in the time of the sack of Belgium, when the Germans
+locked up five of us for a day and a night in a cow stable where no
+self-respecting cow would voluntarily have stayed, and, then sent us by
+train under guard on a three-day journey into Germany, yet all the while
+kept right on telling us we were not prisoners but guests of the German
+Army. And at the end of the third day we reached the unanimous conclusion
+among ourselves that the only outstanding distinction we could see, from
+where we sat, between being prisoners of the German Army and guests of the
+German Army was that from time to time they did feed the prisoners. For
+throughout the journey the eight of us--since by now our little party had
+grown--lived rather simply and frugally and, I might say, sketchily on
+rations consisting of one loaf of soldiers' bread, one bottle of mineral
+water and a one-pound pot of sour and rancid honey which must have
+emanated in the first place from a lot of very morbid, low-minded bees.
+
+However, in those exciting days there were many little moving distractions
+about to keep one from brooding o'ermuch on thoughts of lacking provender.
+I boast not, but merely utter a verity, when I state that every time I
+shook myself I shifted the center of population. Where we had been the
+lesser wild life of midcontinental Europe abounded. In the matter of a
+distinction which had come to me utterly without solicitation or effort on
+my part I have no desire to brag, but in justice to myself--and my
+boarders--I must add that at that moment, of all the human beings in
+Central Europe, I was the most densely inhabited. My companions scratched
+along, doing fairly well, too; but I led the field--I was so much roomier
+than any one of them was.
+
+But here aboard this Pullman on this, the dedicatory day of my
+self-imposed martyrdom, I could not lose myself as I had on that former
+historic occasion in the ardor of chasing the small game of the country.
+By four o'clock in the afternoon I could appreciate the sensations of a
+conch shell on a parlor whatnot. I had a feeling that if anyone were to
+press his ear up against me he would hear a murmuring sound as of distant
+sea waves. Yet, mark you, I held bravely out, fighting still the good
+fight. This, then, was my dinner, if such it might in truth be called:
+Clear soup, a smallish slice of rare roast beef cut shaving thin, gluten
+bread sparsely buttered, a cloud of watercress no larger than a man's
+hand, another raw apple and a bit of domestic cheese--nothing rich,
+nothing exotic, no melting French _fromages_, no creamy Danish pastries.
+
+Only when I reached my demi-tasse, which I took straight, did I permit
+myself a touch of luxury. I lit my cigar with a genuine imported Swedish
+parlor match.
+
+Followed then the first comforting manifestation, the first gratefully
+registered taste of recompense for my privations. I had to speak that
+night and in a large hall, too, and I found my voice to be clearer and
+stronger than usual, and found, also, that I spoke with much less effort
+than usual. I was sure partial fasting during the day was bearing fruits
+in the evening, and I was right, as subsequent evening experiences proved
+to me. I had rather dreaded that hunger gripes would make my night a
+sleepless one, but it didn't happen. I may have dreamed longing dreams
+about victuals, but I tore off eight solid hours of unbridled and--I dare
+say--uproarious rest.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+_Wherein Our Hero Falters_
+
+
+Next day I kept it up, varying the first day's menus slightly, but keeping
+the bulk consumption down, roughly, to about one-half or possibly
+one-third what my rations formerly had been. Before night of the second
+day that all-gone sensation had vanished. Already I had made the agreeable
+discovery that I could get along and be reasonably happy on from 35 to 50
+per cent of what until then I had deludedly thought was required to
+nourish me. Before the week ended I felt fitter and sprier in every way
+than I had for years past; more alive, more interested in things, quicker
+on my feet and brisker in my mental processes than in a long time. The
+chronic logy, foggy feeling in my head disappeared and failed to return.
+I may add that to date it still has not returned. Relieved of pressure
+against its valves--at least I assume that was what came to pass--my heart
+began functioning as I assume a normal heart should function, and at once
+the sense of oppression in the neighborhood of the heart was gone.
+
+Within the same week I took most joyful note of the fact that I was losing
+flesh in the vicinities where mainly I craved to lose it amidships and at
+the throat. I still had a double chin in front, but the third one, which I
+carried behind as a spare--the one which ran all the way round my neck and
+lapped at the back like a clergyman's collar--was melting away. And unless
+I was woefully mistaken, I no longer had to fight so desperate a battle
+with the waistband of my trousers when I dressed in the mornings.
+
+I was not mistaken. Glory be and likewise selah! My first and second
+mezzanines were visibly shrinking. By these signs and portents was I
+stimulated to continue the campaign so auspiciously launched and so
+satisfactorily progressing.
+
+I shall not deny that in the second week I did some backsliding. The swing
+of the tour carried me into the South. It was the South in the splendor of
+the young springtime when the cardinal bird sang his mating song. With
+brocading dandelions each pasture gloriously became even as the Field of
+the Cloth of Gold; and lo, the beginning of the strawberry shortcake
+season overlapped the last of the smoked-hog-jowl-and-turnip-greens
+period, and the voice of the turtle was heard in the land.
+
+Figuratively, I was swept off my feet when a noble example of Southern
+womanhood put before my famished eyes the following items, to wit: About
+half a bushel of newly picked turnip greens, rearing islandwise above a
+sloshing sea of pot licker and supporting upon their fronded crests the
+boiled but impressive countenance of a hickory-cured shote, the whole
+being garnished with paired-off poached eggs like the topaz eyes of
+beauteous blond virgins turned soulfully heavenward; and set off by
+flankings of small piping-hot corn pones made with meal and water and salt
+and shortening, as Providence intended a proper corn pone should be made.
+
+Then the years rolled away like a scroll and once again was I back in the
+Kentucky foothills, a lean and lathy sprout of a kid, a limber six-foot
+length of perpendicular appetite; and it was twelve o'clock for some
+people, but it was dinner time for me!
+
+My glad low gurgle of anticipatory joy smothered the small inner voice of
+caution as I leaped, as it were, headlong into that bosky dell of young
+turnip greens. So, having set my feet on the downward path I backslode
+some more--for behold, what should come along then but an old-fashioned
+shortcake, fashioned of crisp biscuit dough, with more fresh strawberries
+bedded down between its multiplied and mounting layers than you could buy
+at the Fritz-Charlton for a hundred and ninety dollars.
+
+Right then and there was when and where I lost all I had gained in a
+fortnight of stalwart self-disciplining; rather it was where I regained
+all I haply had lost. When, gorged and comatose, I staggered from that
+fair matron's depleted table I should never have dared to trundle over a
+wooden culvert at faster than four miles an hour. Either I should have
+slowed down or waited until they could put in some re-enforced-concrete
+underpinnings.
+
+I was right back where I had started, and for the moment didn't care a
+darn either. Sin is glorious when you sin gloriously.
+
+But I rallied. I retrieved myself. However, I do not take all the credit
+to myself for this; circumstances favored me. Shortly I quitted the land
+of temptation where I had been born, and was back again up North living on
+dining cars and in hotels, with nothing more seductive to resist than
+processed pastry and machine-made shortcakes and Thousand Islands
+dressing; which made the fight all the easier to win, especially as
+regards the last named. I sometimes wonder why, with a thousand islands to
+choose from, the official salad mixer of the average hotel always picks
+the wrong one.
+
+I kept on. The thing proved magically easy of accomplishment. By the fit
+of my clothing, if by nothing else, I could have told that several of my
+more noticeable convexes were becoming plane surfaces and gave promise in
+due season of becoming almost concave, some of 'em. But there was other
+and convincing testimony besides. I could tell it by my physical feelings,
+by my viewpoint, by my enhanced zest for work and for play.
+
+Purposely, for the first month I refrained from weighing myself. When I
+did begin weighing at regular intervals I found I was losing at a rate of
+between two and three pounds a week. Moreover, I had now proved to my own
+satisfaction that within sane reasonable limitations I could resume eating
+most of the things which formerly I ate to excess and which I had
+altogether eliminated from my menus during the initiatory stages of
+dieting.
+
+About the time I emerged from the novitiate class I discerned yet one more
+gratifying fact. If I were in the woods, camping and fishing, or hunting
+or tramping or riding or taking any fairly arduous form of exercise, I
+could eat pretty much anything and everything, no matter how fattening it
+might be. Work in the open air whetted my appetite, but the added exertion
+burned up the waste matter so that the surplus went into bodily strength
+instead of into fatty layers. Consumption was larger, but assimilation was
+perfect.
+
+For my daily life at home, where I am writing this, I have cut out these
+things: All the cereals; nearly all the white bread; all the hot bread;
+practically all pastries except very light pastries; white potatoes
+absolutely; rice to a large extent; sausages and fresh pork and nearly all
+the ham; cream in my coffee and on fruits; and a few of the starchier
+vegetables.
+
+Of butter and of cheese and of nuts I eat perhaps one-third the amount I
+used to eat, and of meats, roughly, one-half as much as before the dawn of
+reason came. Of everything except the items I just have enumerated I eat
+as freely as I please. And when a person begins to reckon up everything
+else among the edibles--flesh, fowl, fish, berries, fruits, vegetables and
+the rest he finds quite a sizable list.
+
+I shall not pretend that I do not pine often for sundry tabooed things.
+Take pies, now--if there is any person alive who likes his pie better than
+I do he's the king of the pie likers, that's all. And I am desolated at
+being compelled to bar out the rice--not the gummy, glued-together,
+sticky, messy stuff which Northerners eat with milk and sugar on it, but
+real orthodox rice such as only Southerners and Chinamen and East Indians
+know how to prepare; white and fluffy and washed free of all the lurking
+library paste; with every grain standing up separate and distinct like
+well-popped corn and treated only with salt, pepper and butter, or with
+salt, pepper and gravy before being consumed.
+
+And as for white potatoes--well, it distresses me deeply to think that
+hereafter the Irish potato, except when I'm camping out, will be to me
+merely something to stopper the spout of a coal-oil can with, or to stab
+the office pen in on the clerk's desk in an American-plan hotel. For I
+have ever cherished the Irish potato as one of Nature's most succulent
+gifts to mankind. I like potatoes all styles and every style, French
+fried, lyonnaise, O'Brien, shoestring shape, pants-button design, hashed
+brown, creamed, mashed, stewed, soufflé--if only I knew who blew 'em
+up--and most of all, baked _au naturel_ in the union suit. And I miss them
+and shall keep on missing them. But no longer do I yearn for cream in my
+coffee, now that it is out of it, and I am getting reconciled to dry toast
+for breakfast, where once upon a time only members of the justly famous
+Flap Jackson family seemed to satisfy.
+
+Of course I imbibe alcoholic stimulant when and where procurable. From the
+standpoint of one intent upon cutting a few running feet off the waistline
+measurements this distinctly is wrong, as full well I know. But what would
+you? I do not wish to pose as an eccentric. I have no desire to be pointed
+out as a person aiming to make himself conspicuously erratic by behaving
+differently from the run of his fellows. Since the advent of Prohibition
+nearly everybody I meet is drinking with an unbridled enthusiasm; and when
+not engaged in the act of drinking is discussing the latest and most
+approved methods of evading, circumventing and defying the Federal and
+State statutes against drinking. Therefore I drink, too. Even so, I have
+not yet succeeded in accustoming my palate to strong waters
+indiscriminately swallowed. I confess to a fear that I shall never make a
+complete success of the undertaking.
+
+I suppose the trouble with me is lack of desire. Prior to the attempted
+enforcement of the Eighteenth Amendment potable and vatted mixtures had
+but small lure for my palate, or my stomach, or my temperament. An
+occasional mild cocktail before a dinner, and perhaps twice a week a
+bottle of light beer or a glass of light wine with the dinner--these, in
+those old wild wicked days which ended in January, 1920, practically made
+up the tally of my habitual flirtations with the accursed Demon. In the
+springtime I might chamber an occasional mint julep, but this, really, was
+a sort of rite, a gesture of salute to the young green year. Likewise at
+Christmas time I partook sparingly of the ceremonial and traditional
+egg-nog. And once in a great while, on a bitter cold night in the winter,
+a hot apple toddy was not without its attractions. But these indulgences
+about covered the situation, alcoholically speaking, so far as I was
+concerned. For me the strong, heady vintages, whether still or sparkling,
+and the more potent distillations had mighty little appeal. Champagne, to
+me, was about the poorest substitute for good well-water that had ever
+been proposed; and the Messrs. Haig & Haig never had to put on a night
+shift at the works on my account.
+
+Yet I came from a mid-section of the republic where in the olden days
+Bourbon whiskey was regarded as a proper staff of life. The town where I
+was born was one of the last towns below Mason & Dixon's Line to stand out
+against the local option wave which had swept the smaller interior
+communities of America; and my native state of Kentucky was one of the two
+remaining states of the South, Louisiana being the other, which had not
+officially gone dry by legislative action up to the time when Br'er
+Volstead's pleasant little act went over nationally.
+
+While I was growing up, through boyhood, through my youth and on into
+manhood, I had the example of whiskey-drinking all about me. Many of our
+oldest and most respected families owned and operated distilleries. Some
+of them had been distillers for generations past; they were proud of the
+purity of their product. Men of all stations in life drank freely and with
+no sense of shame in their drinking. Mainly they took their'n straight or
+in toddies; in those parts, twenty years ago, the high-ball was looked
+upon with suspicion as a foreign error which had been imported by
+misguided individuals up North who didn't know any better than to drown
+good liquor in charged water. There were decanters on the sideboard; there
+were jimmy-johns in the cellar; and down at the place on the corner twenty
+standard varieties of bottled Bourbons and ryes were to be had at an
+exceedingly moderate price. Bar-rail instep, which is a fallen arch
+reversed, was a common complaint among us.
+
+Even elderly ladies who looked with abhorrence upon the drinking habit
+were not denied their wee bit nippy. They got it, never knowing that they
+got it. Some of them stayed pleasantly corned year in and year out and
+supposed all the time they merely were enjoying good health. For them
+stimulating tonics containing not in excess of sixty per cent of pure
+grain alcohol were provided by pious patent-medicine manufacturers in
+Chattanooga and Atlanta and Louisville--earnest-minded, philanthropic
+patriots these were, who strongly advocated the closing-up of the Rum
+Hole, which was their commonest pet name for the corner saloon, but who
+viewed with a natural repugnance those provisions of the Pure Food Act
+requiring printed confession as to fluid contents upon the labels of their
+own goods. It was no uncommon thing in the Sunny Southland to observe a
+staunch churchgoer who was an outspoken advocate of temperance rising up
+and giving three rousing hiccups for good old Dr. Bunkum's Nerve Balm. And
+distinctly I recall the occasion when a stalwart mother in Israel,
+starting off to attend a wedding and feeling the need of a little special
+toning-up beforehand, took three wineglassfuls of her favorite Blood
+Purifier instead of the customary one which she took before a meal; and,
+as a consequence, on her arrival at the scene of festivities was with
+difficulty dissuaded from snatching down the Southern smilax and other
+decorations that she might twine with them a wreath to crown herself. She
+somehow had got the idea that she was the queen emeritus of the May. It
+was reported about town afterward that she tried to do the giant swing on
+the parlor chandelier. But this was a gross exaggeration; she only tried
+to hang by her legs from it.
+
+Reared, as I was, amid such surroundings and in a commonwealth abounding
+in distilleries, rectifying works, blending establishments, bottle-houses,
+barrel-houses, and saloons, I should have been a hopeless inebriate long
+before I came of age. The literature of any total abstinence society
+would prove conclusively that I never had a chance to avoid filling a
+drunkard's grave. Yet somehow I escaped the fate ordained for me. As I
+say, I drank sparingly and for long periods not at all, until Prohibition
+came. Then I began doing as about ninety per cent of my fellow-adult
+Americans began doing--which was to take a drink when the opportunity
+offered. As I diagnose it, we nearly all are actuated now by much the same
+instinct which causes a small boy to loot a jam closet. He doesn't
+particularly want all that jam but he takes the jam because it is
+summarily denied him and because he's afraid he may never again get a
+whack at unlimited jam.
+
+To my way of thinking, the main result of the effort drastically to
+enforce Prohibition, aside from making us a nation of law-breakers,
+law-evaders, sneaks, bribers, boot-leggers, bigots, corruptionists and
+moral cowards, has been to transfer the burden of inebriety from one set
+of shoulders to another set of shoulders. Men who formerly drank to
+excess have sobered up, against their will, for lack of cash or lack of
+chance to buy hard liquor. They cannot rake together enough coin to
+purchase the adulterated stuff at ten times the price they had paid for
+better liquor before the law went into effect. On the other hand, men--and
+women--who formerly drank but little are now drinking to excess, some of
+them being prompted, I think, by a feeling of protest against what they
+regard as an invasion of their personal liberties and some, no doubt,
+inspired by a perfectly understandable impulse to do a thing which is
+forbidden when the doing of it gives them a sense of adventure and daring.
+
+Far be it from an humble citizen to criticise our national law-making
+body. Far be it from him, as he contemplates the spectacle frequently
+presented under the dome of the Capitol at Washington, to paraphrase Ethan
+Allen's celebrated remark when he took Fort Ticonderoga in the name of
+Jehovah and the Continental fathers and exclaim: "Congress--oh, my God!"
+Far be it, I repeat, from such a one to do such things as these. But I
+trust I may be pardoned for venturing the statements that excessive
+drinking already was going out of fashion in this country, that the
+treating evil was in a fair way to die a natural death anyhow, and that
+the present sumptuary attempt to cure us overnight of a habit which has
+been ingrained in the very fibre of the race for so far back as the
+history of the race runs, has only had the effect of making a bad thing
+worse.
+
+At that, I hold no brief for the brewer and the distiller. They got
+exactly what was coming to them. Had they, as a class, been content to
+obey the existing laws, instead of conniving to break them; had they kept
+their meddling fingers out of local politics; had they realized more fully
+their responsibilities as manufacturers and purveyors of potentially
+dangerous products; had they been willing to cooperate with right-thinking
+men in a sane and orderly campaign for the cleaning-up and the proper
+regulation of the liquor traffic; had they seen that the common man's
+inarticulate but very definite resentment against the iniquities of the
+corner saloon system was tending to the legal abolition of the whole
+business of licensed drinking, I believe we should have had no Eighteenth
+Amendment saddled upon us and no Volstead act to bridle us.
+
+In the final analysis, and stripping aside the lesser contributory causes,
+I maintain there were just two outstanding reasons why this country went
+dry after the fashion in which it did go dry: One reason was the
+Distiller; the other was the Brewer. And for the woes of either or both I,
+for one, decline to shed a single tear.
+
+How a fellow does run on when he gets on the subject which is uppermost in
+the minds of the American people this year! All I intended to say, when I
+started off on this tack, a few pages back, was that if I absolutely and
+completely cut out all alcoholic stimulant no doubt I should be reducing
+my weight much faster than is the case at this writing. To-day practically
+all the members in good standing of the Order of Friendly Sons of the
+Boiled Spinach--I mean the dietetic sharps--agree that he or she who is
+banting will be well-advised to drink not at all. For the most part they
+do not make a moral issue of this detail. Some of them refuse to concede
+that a teetotaler is necessarily healthier or happier or more useful to
+the world than the moderate imbiber is. They merely point out that
+whiskies and beers are, for the majority of humans, fattening things and
+should therefore be eliminated from the diet of those wishful to lose
+their superfluous adipose tissue. Here, again, they disagree with their
+professional forebears. The experts of the preceding generations, being
+mainly Englishmen and Germans, could not conceive of living without
+drinking. Some advocated wines, some ales, some a mixture of both with an
+occasional measure of spirits added for the sake of digestion. But among
+the dependable dietetic authorities of the present day there appears to
+be no wide range of argument on this point. They pretty generally agree
+that even a casual indulgence in beverages is not indicated for those who
+seek to reduce. I am sure they are right. But as I remarked just now, what
+can you do when you are encompassed about by the bottle-toting,
+sop-it-up-behind-the-door custom which has sprung up since Prohibition was
+slipped over on us by the Anti-Saloon League?
+
+I confess that I have not the strength of character to swim, almost alone,
+against the social current. So I partake of the occasional snort and to
+that extent stand a self-admitted apologist for an offense which no true
+reductionist should commit.
+
+But I claim that otherwise--that in so far as the solid foodstuffs are
+concerned--I have, for my own individual case, exactly the right idea
+about it.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+_Three Cheers for Lithesome Grace Regained!_
+
+
+My advice to the man or the woman who is in the same fix I was in is to go
+and do likewise, with variations to suit the individual temperament. It
+means self-denial but self-denial persevered in is a virtue, and virtue he
+will find--or she will--not alone is its own reward but a number of
+additional rewards as well. Let my late fellow sufferer likewise patronize
+the gymnasium and the steam room and the cold plunge if he so chooses. If
+he desires to have automatic pores, all right. As for me, I recall what
+the Good Book says about the pores which ye have always with ye, and I
+decline to worry about the present uncultured state of mine. Let him try
+the electric rollers and the electric baths, if such be his bent; no doubt
+they have their value. And by all means let him consult a qualified
+physician if he fears either that he is overdoing or underdoing his
+banting. Personally, though, I am satisfied with the plan I tried out, of
+being my own private test tube.
+
+I claim that I have better information touching on what sustenance I need
+than any outsider ever can hope to have unless he breaks into me
+surgically. I claim that a series of rational experiments should tell any
+rational human how much he needs to eat and what he needs to eat in order
+to reduce his bulk and yet keep his powers and his bodily vigor
+unimpaired. I am not speaking now, understand me, of those unfortunates
+with whom obesity is a disease, but of those who owe their grossness of
+outline to gluttony. Lacking vital statistics on the subject, I
+nevertheless dare assert that these latter constitute fully 90 per cent of
+those among the American people who are distinctly and uncomfortably and
+frequently unhealthily fat.
+
+Remains but one fly in the ointment. Since Tony Sarg is going to
+illustrate this treatise, then Tony must revise the old working plans. For
+my figure is not so much pro as once it was. It is more con, if you get my
+meaning--the profile curves in toward, instead of being, as formerly, so
+noticeably from.
+
+Still, I should worry about the troubles of an artist, even though a
+friend. I weighed myself this morning. Three months ago, when I set out to
+reduce my belt line and my collar size, I snatched the beam down ker-smack
+at two hundred and thirty-six pounds, stripped. This morning I weighed
+exactly one hundred and ninety-seven, including amalgam fillings and the
+rights of translation into foreign languages, including the Scandinavian.
+One hundred and eighty-five pounds is my ultimate aim. Howsoever, I may
+keep right on when I attain that figure and justify the title of this
+book by taking a full one third off. In either event, though, I shall
+know exactly where I am going and I'm on my way. And I feel bully and I'm
+happy about it and boastfully proud.
+
+Three rousing cheers for lithesome grace regained!
+
+
+THE END
+
+[Transcriber's note: Obvious typos in this project were corrected.]
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of One Third Off, by Irvin S. Cobb
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+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of One Third Off, by Irvin S. Cobb
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: One Third Off
+
+Author: Irvin S. Cobb
+
+Illustrator: Tony Sarg
+
+Release Date: July 4, 2005 [EBook #16197]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ONE THIRD OFF ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Bryan Ness, Melissa Er-Raqabi and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+
+<h1><i>One Third Off</i></h1>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<div class="figcenter">
+<a name="inside" id="inside"></a>
+<img src="images/inside.jpg"
+alt="Inside Cover"
+title="Inside Cover" />
+</div>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p class="center">
+<b><i>By Irvin S. Cobb</i></b><br /><br />
+
+<i>Fiction</i><br />
+
+FROM PLACE TO PLACE<br />
+THOSE TIMES AND THESE<br />
+LOCAL COLOR<br />
+OLD JUDGE PRIEST<br />
+BACK HOME<br />
+THE ESCAPE OF MR. TRIMM</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>Wit and Humor</i></p>
+
+<p class="center">ONE THIRD OFF<br />
+A PLEA FOR OLD CAP COLLIER<br />
+THE ABANDONED FARMERS<br />
+THE LIFE OF THE PARTY<br />
+EATING IN TWO OR THREE LANGUAGES<br />
+&quot;OH WELL, YOU KNOW HOW WOMEN ARE!&quot;<br />
+FIBBLE D.D.<br />
+&quot;SPEAKING OF OPERATIONS&mdash;&quot;<br />
+EUROPE REVISED<br />
+ROUGHING IT DE LUXE<br />
+COBB'S BILL OF FARE<br />
+COBB'S ANATOMY</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>Miscellany</i></p>
+
+<p class="center">THE THUNDERS OF SILENCE<br />
+THE GLORY OF THE COMING<br />
+PATHS OF GLORY<br />
+&quot;SPEAKING OF PRUSSIANS&mdash;&quot;</p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p class="center"><i>New York</i></p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>George H. Doran Company</i></p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+
+
+<div class="figcenter">
+<a name="title" id="title"></a>
+<img src="images/title.jpg"
+alt="i weighed myself and in the box score credited myself with a profound shock."
+title="i weighed myself and in the box score credited myself with a profound shock." />
+<br /><span class="caption">i weighed myself and in the box score credited myself with a profound shock.</span>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+<h1><i>One Third Off</i></h1>
+
+<h3><i>By</i></h3>
+
+<h2><i>Irvin S. Cobb</i></h2>
+
+<p class="center"><i>Author of<br />
+&quot;Old Judge Priest,&quot; &quot;Speaking<br />
+of Operations&mdash;&quot; Etc.</i></p>
+
+<h2><i>Illustrated by Tony Sarg</i></h2>
+
+<div><br /></div>
+<div><br /></div>
+<div><br /></div>
+
+<p class="center"><i>New York</i></p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>George H. Doran Company</i>
+</p>
+
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+<p class="center"><i>Copyright, 1921,</i></p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>By George H. Doran Company</i></p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>Copyright, 1921,</i></p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>By The Curtis Publishing Company</i></p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>Printed in the United States of America</i>
+</p>
+
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+<h1><i>One Third Off</i></h1>
+<div><br /></div>
+<div><br /></div>
+<div><br /></div>
+
+<p class="center"><span class='smcap'>to</span><br />
+HARRY M. STEVENS, <span class='smcap'>Esquire</span><br />
+<span class='smcap'>who in times gone by helped me</span><br />
+<span class='smcap'>put that one third on</span>
+</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+<h2><i>CONTENTS</i></h2>
+
+
+
+<div class='center'>
+<table border="0" cellpadding="1" cellspacing="0" summary="COntents">
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="#CHAPTER_I">CHAPTER ONE:</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><i>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Extra! Extra! All About the Great Reduction</i></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="#CHAPTER_II">CHAPTER TWO:</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><i>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Those Romping Elfin Twenties</i></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="#CHAPTER_III">CHAPTER THREE:</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><i>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Regarding Liver-Eating Watkins and Others</i></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="#CHAPTER_IV">CHAPTER FOUR:</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><i>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;I Become the Panting Champion</i></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="#CHAPTER_V">CHAPTER FIVE:</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><i>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;On Acquiring Some Snappy Pores</i></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="#CHAPTER_VI">CHAPTER SIX:</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><i>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;More Anon</i></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="#CHAPTER_VII">CHAPTER SEVEN:</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><i>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Office Visits, $10</i></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="#CHAPTER_VIII">CHAPTER EIGHT:</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><i>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;The Friendly Sons of the Boiled Spinach</i></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="#CHAPTER_IX">CHAPTER NINE:</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><i>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;The Fallen Egg</i></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="#CHAPTER_X">CHAPTER TEN:</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><i>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Wherein Our Hero Falters</i></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="#CHAPTER_XI">CHAPTER ELEVEN:</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><i>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Three Cheers for Lithesome Grace Regained</i></td></tr>
+</table></div>
+
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>ILLUSTRATIONS</h2>
+
+
+<div class='center'>
+<table border="0" cellpadding="1" cellspacing="0" summary="Illustrations">
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="#title">I weighed myself and in the box score credited myself with a profound shock</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="#x015">&quot;64 Broad&quot;</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="#x036">To observe Mr. Bryan breakfasting is a sight worth seeing</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="#x073">&quot;You are now registering the preliminary warnings&mdash;&quot;</a></td></tr>
+</table></div>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_I" id="CHAPTER_I" /><span class='smcap'>chapter i</span></h2>
+
+<h2><i>Extra! Extra! All About The Great Reduction!</i></h2>
+
+
+<p>The way I look at this thing is this way: If something happens to you and
+by writing about it you can make a bit of money and at the same time be a
+benefactor to the race, then why not? Does not the philanthropic aspect of
+the proposition more than balance off the mercenary side? I hold that it
+does, or at least that it should, in the estimation of all fair-minded
+persons. It is to this class that I particularly address myself.
+Unfair-minded persons are advised to take warning and stop right here with
+the contemporary paragraph. That which follows in this little volume is
+not for them.</p>
+
+<p>An even stronger motive impels me. In hereinafter setting forth at length
+and in detail the steps taken by me in making myself thin, or, let us
+say, thinner, I am patterning after the tasteful and benevolent examples
+of some of the most illustrious ex-fat men of letters in our country. Take
+Samuel G. Blythe now. Mr. Blythe is the present international bant-weight
+champion. There was a time, though, when he was what the world is pleased
+to call over-sized. In writing on several occasions, and always
+entertainingly and helpfully, upon the subject of the methods employed by
+him to reduce himself to his current proportions I hold that he had the
+right idea about it.</p>
+
+<p>Getting fat is a fault; except when caused by the disease known as
+obesity, it is a bad habit. Getting thin and at the same time retaining
+one's health is a virtue. Never does the reductionist feel quite so
+virtuous as when for the first time, perhaps in decades, he can stand
+straight up and look straight down and behold the tips of his toes. His
+virtue is all the more pleasant to him because it recalls a reformation on
+his part and because it has called for self-denial. I started to say that
+it had called for mortification of the flesh, but I shan't. Despite the
+contrary opinions of the early fathers of the church, I hold that the
+mortification 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.</p>
+
+<p>Ask any fat man&mdash;or better still, any formerly fat man&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter">
+<a name="x015" id="x015"></a>
+<img src="images/x015.jpg"
+alt="&quot;64 broad.&quot;" title="&quot;64 broad.&quot;" />
+<br /><span class="caption">&quot;64 broad.&quot;</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>Besides, when I got fat I capitalized my fatness in the printed word. I
+told how it felt to be fat.</p>
+
+<p>I described how natural it was for a fat man to feel like the Grand Ca&ntilde;on
+before dinner and like the Royal Gorge afterwards.</p>
+
+<p>I told how, if he wedged himself into a telephone booth and said, &quot;64
+Broad,&quot; persons overhearing him were not sure whether he was asking
+Central for a number or telling a tailor what his waist measurements were.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;glory be!&mdash;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.</p>
+
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_II" id="CHAPTER_II" /><span class='smcap'>chapter ii</span></h2>
+
+<h2><i>Those Romping Elfin Twenties</i></h2>
+
+
+<p>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&mdash;ah, those romping elfin twenties!&mdash;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&mdash;I had several, and none of them was complimentary but
+all of them were graphic&mdash;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 shepherd's crook.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Yet I ate heartily of all things that appealed to my palate, eating at
+least two kinds of hot bread at every meal&mdash;down South we say it with
+flours&mdash;and using chewing tobacco for the salad course, as was the custom.
+I ate copiously at and between meals and gained not a whit.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_III" id="CHAPTER_III" /><span class='smcap'>chapter iii</span></h2>
+
+<h2><i>Regarding Liver-Eating Watkins and Others</i></h2>
+
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;thus I to myself in the same strain,
+continuing&mdash;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?</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>There are two sorts of evidence upon which many judges look askance&mdash;that
+sort of evidence which is circumstantial and that sort which purely is
+hearsay. In this connection, and departing for the space of a paragraph or
+so from the main theme, I am reminded of the incident through which a
+certain picturesque gentleman of the early days in California acquired a
+name which he was destined to wear forever after, and under which his
+memory is still affectionately encysted in the traditions of our great Far
+West. I refer to the late Liver-Eating Watkins. Mr. Watkins entered into
+active life and passed through a good part of it bearing the
+unilluminative and commonplace first name of Elmer or Lemuel, or perhaps
+it was Jasper. Just which one of these or some other I forgot now, but no
+matter; at least it was some such. One evening a low-down
+terra-cotta-colored Piute swiped two of Mr. Watkins' paint ponies and by
+stealth, under cover of the cloaking twilight, went away with them into
+the far mysterious spaces of the purpling sage.</p>
+
+<p>To these ponies the owner was deeply attached, not alone on account of the
+intrinsic value, but for sentimental reasons likewise. So immediately on
+discovering the loss the next morning, Mr. Watkins took steps. He saddled
+a third pony which the thief had somehow overlooked in the haste of
+departure, and he girded on him both cutlery and shootlery, and he mounted
+and soon was off and away across the desert upon the trail of the vanished
+malefactor. Now when Mr. Watkins fared forth thus accoutered it was a sign
+he was not out for his health or anybody else's.</p>
+
+<p>Friends and well-wishers volunteered to accompany him upon the chase, for
+they foresaw brisk doings. But he declined their company. Folklore,
+descending from his generation to ours, has it that he said this was his
+own business and he preferred handling it alone in his own way. He did
+add, however, that on overtaking the fugitive it was his intention, as an
+earnest or token of his displeasure, to eat that Injun's liver raw. Some
+versions say he mentioned liver rare, but the commonly accepted legend has
+it that the word used was <i>raw</i>. With this he put the spur to his steed's
+flank and was soon but a mere moving speck in the distance.</p>
+
+<p>Now there was never offered any direct proof that our hero, in pursuance
+of his plan for teaching the Indian a lesson, actually did do with regard
+to the latter's liver what he had promised the bystanders he would do;
+moreover, touching on this detail he ever thereafter maintained a
+steadfast and unbreakable silence. In lieu of corroborative testimony by
+unbiased witnesses as to the act itself, we have only these two things to
+judge by: First, that when Mr. Watkins returned in the dusk of the same
+day he was wearing upon his face a well-fed, not to say satiated,
+expression, yet had started forth that morning with no store of
+provisions; and second, that on being found in a deceased state some days
+later, the Piute, who when last previously seen had with him two of Mr.
+Watkin's pintos and one liver of his own, was now shy all three. By these
+facts a strong presumptive case having been made out, Mr. Watkins was
+thenceforth known not as Ezekiel or Emanuel, or whatever his original
+first name had been, but as Liver-Eating, or among friends by the
+affectionate diminutive of Liv for short.</p>
+
+<p>This I would regard as a typical instance of the value of a chain of good
+circumstantial evidence, with no essential link lacking. Direct testimony
+could hardly have been more satisfactory, all things considered; and yet
+direct testimony is the best sort there is, in the law courts and out. On
+the other hand, hearsay evidence is viewed legally and often by the layman
+with suspicion; in most causes of action being barred out altogether.
+Nevertheless, it is a phase of the fattish man's perversity that,
+rejecting the direct, the circumstantial and the circumferential testimony
+which abounds about him, he too often awaits confirmation of his growing
+suspicions at the hands of outsiders and bystanders before he is willing
+openly to admit that condition of fatness which for long has been patent
+to the most casual observer.</p>
+
+<p>Women, as I have observed them, are even more disposed to avoid confession
+on this point. A woman somehow figures that so long as she refuses to
+acknowledge to herself or any other interested party that she has
+progressed out of the ranks of the plumpened into the congested and
+overflowing realms of the avowedly obese, why, for just so long may she
+keep the rest of the world in ignorance too. I take it, the ostrich which
+first set the example to all the other ostriches of trying to avoid
+detection by the enemy through the simple expedient of sticking its head
+in the sand was a lady ostrich, and moreover one typical of her sex. But
+men are bad enough. I know that I was.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_IV" id="CHAPTER_IV" /><span class='smcap'>chapter iv</span></h2>
+
+<h2><i>I Become The Panting Champion</i></h2>
+
+
+<p>Month after month, through the cycle of the revolving seasons, I went
+along deceiving myself, even though I deceived none else, coining new
+pleas in extenuation or outright contradictions to meet each new-arising
+element of confirmatory proof to a state of case which no unprejudiced
+person could fail to acknowledge. The original discoverer of the alibi was
+a fat man; indeed, it was named for him&mdash;Ali Bi-Ben Adhem, he was, a
+friend and companion of the Prophet, and so large that, going into Mecca,
+he had to ride on two camels. This fact is historically authenticated. I
+looked it up.</p>
+
+<p>In the fall of the year, when I brought last winter's heavy suit out of
+the clothes-press and found it now to hug o'ersnugly for comfort, I
+cajoled my saner self into accepting a most transparent lie&mdash;my figure had
+not materially altered through the intervening spring and summer; it was
+only that the garments, being fashioned of a shoddy material, had shrunk.
+I owned a dress suit which had been form fitting, 'tis true, but none too
+close a fit upon me. I had owned it for years; I looked forward to owning
+and using it for years to come. I laid it aside for a period during an
+abatement in formal social activities; then bringing it forth from its
+camphor-ball nest for a special occasion I found I could scarce force my
+way down into the trousers, and that the waistcoat buttons could not be
+made to meet the buttonholes, and that the coat, after finally I had
+struggled into it, bound me as with chains by reason of the pull at
+armpits and between the shoulders. I could not get my arms down to my
+sides at all. I could only use them flapper fashion.</p>
+
+<p>I felt like a penguin. I imagine I looked a good bit like one too.</p>
+
+<p>But I did not blame myself, who was the real criminal, or the grocer who
+was accessory before the fact. I put the fault on the tailor, who was
+innocent. Each time I had to let my belt buckle out for another notch in
+order that I might breathe I diagnosed the trouble as a touch of what
+might be called Harlem flatulency. We lived in a flat then&mdash;a nonelevator
+flat&mdash;and I pretended that climbing three flights of steep stairs was what
+developed my abdominal muscles and at the same time made me short of wind.</p>
+
+<p>I coined a new excuse after we had moved to a suburb back of Yonkers.
+Frequently I had to run to catch the 5:07 accommodation, because if I
+missed it I might have to wait for the 7:05, which was no accommodation. I
+would go jamming my way at top speed toward the train gate and on into the
+train shed, and when I reached my car I would be 'scaping so emphatically
+that the locomotive on up ahead would grow jealous and probably felt as
+though it might just as well give up trying to compete in volume of sound
+output with a real contender. But I was agile enough for all purposes and
+as brisk as any upon my feet. Therein I found my consolation.</p>
+
+<p>Among all my fellow members of the younger Grand Central Station set there
+was scarce a one who could start with me at scratch and beat me to a train
+just pulling out of the shed; and even though he might have bested me at
+sprinting, I had him whipped to a souffl&eacute; at panting. In a hundred-yard
+dash I could spot anyone of my juniors a dozen pairs of pants and win out
+handily. I was the acknowledged all-weights panting champion of the Putnam
+division.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter">
+<a name="x036" id="x036"></a>
+<img src="images/x036.jpg"
+alt="to observe mr. bryan breakfasting is a sight worth seeing."
+title="to observe mr. bryan breakfasting is a sight worth seeing." />
+<br /><span class="caption">to observe mr. bryan breakfasting is a sight worth seeing.</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>If there had been ten or twelve of my neighbors as good at this as I was
+we might have organized and drilled together and worked out a class cheer
+for the Putnam Division Country Club&mdash;three deep long pants, say,
+followed by nine sharp short pants or pantlets. But I would have been
+elected pants leader without a struggle. My merits were too self-evident
+for a contest.</p>
+
+<p>But did I attribute my supremacy in this regard to accumulating and
+thickening layers of tissue in the general vicinity of my midriff? I did
+not! No, sir, because I was fat&mdash;indubitably, uncontrovertibly and beyond
+the peradventure of a doubt, fat&mdash;I kept on playing the fat man's game of
+mental solitaire. I inwardly insisted, and I think partly believed, that
+my lung power was too great for the capacity of my throat opening, 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&mdash;the last person in the neighborhood to hear the news.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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, &quot;Well, I see you've brought a spare
+set along with you in case of a puncture.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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!</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>If he was fat, unmistakably and conclusively fat and he was&mdash;what then was
+I? In Troy weight&mdash;Troy where the hay scales come from&mdash;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.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_V" id="CHAPTER_V" /><span class='smcap'>chapter v</span></h2>
+
+<h2><i>On Acquiring Some Snappy Pores</i></h2>
+
+
+<p>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, and I had written copiously of those joys, and I now
+declined to recant of my faith or to abate my indulgences.</p>
+
+<p>All this talk which I had heard about balanced rations went in at one ear
+and out at the other. I knew what a balanced ration was. I stowed one
+aboard three times daily&mdash;at morn, again at noon and once more at
+nightfall. A balanced ration was one which, being eaten, did not pull you
+over on your face; one which you could poise properly if only you leaned
+well back, upon arising from the table, and placed the two hands, with a
+gentle lifting motion, just under the overhang of the main cargo hold.</p>
+
+<p>Surely there must be some way of achieving the desired result other than
+by following dieting devices. There was&mdash;exercising was the answer. I
+would exercise and so become a veritable faun.</p>
+
+<p>Now, so far as I recalled, I had never taken any indoor exercise excepting
+once in a while to knock on wood. I abhorred the thought of ritualistic
+bedroom calisthenics such as were recommended by divers health experts.
+Climbing out of a warm bed and standing out in the middle of a cold room
+and giving an imitation of a demoniac semaphore had never appealed to me
+as a fascinating divertisement for a grown man. As I think I may have
+remarked once before, lying at full length on one's back on the floor
+immediately upon awakening of a morning and raising the legs to full
+length twenty times struck me as a performance lacking in dignity and
+utterly futile.</p>
+
+<p>Besides, what sort of a way was that to greet the dewy morn?</p>
+
+<p>So as an alternative I decided to enroll for membership at a gymnasium
+where I could have company at my exercising and make a sport of what
+otherwise would be in the nature of a punishment. This I did. With a group
+of fellow inmates for my team mates, I tossed the medicine ball about. My
+score at this was perfect; that is to say, sometimes when it came my turn
+to catch I missed the ball, but the ball never once missed me. Always it
+landed on some tender portion of my anatomy, so that my average, written
+in black-and-blue spots, remained an even 1000.</p>
+
+<p>Daily I cantered around and around and around a running track until my
+breathing was such probably as to cause people passing the building to
+think that the West Side Y.M.C.A. was harboring a pet porpoise inside.
+Once, doing this, I caught a glimpse of my own form in a looking-glass
+which for some reason was affixed to one of the pillars flanking the oval.
+A looking-glass properly did not belong there; distinctly it was out of
+place and could serve no worthy purpose. Very few of the sights presented
+in a gym which largely is patronized by city-bred fat men are deserving to
+be mirrored in a glass. They are not such visions as one would care to
+store in fond memory's album. Be that as it may, here was this mirror, and
+swinging down the course suddenly I beheld myself in it. Clad in a
+chastely simple one-piece garment, with my face all a blistered crimson
+and my fingers interlaced together about where the third button of the
+waistcoat, counting from the bottom up, would have been had I been
+wearing any waistcoat, I reminded myself of a badly scorched citizen
+escaping in a scantily dressed condition from a burning homestead bringing
+with him the chief family treasure clasped in his arms. He had saved the
+pianola!</p>
+
+<p>From the running track or the medicine-ball court I would repair to the
+steam room and simmer pleasantly in a temperature of 240 degrees
+Fahrenheit&mdash;I am sure I have the figures right&mdash;until all I needed before
+being served was to have the gravy slightly thickened with flour and a
+dash of water cress added here and there. Having remained in the steam
+cabinet until quite done, I next would jump into the swimming pool, which
+concluded the afternoon's entertainment.</p>
+
+<p>Jumping into the cool water of the pool was supposed to reseal the pores
+which the treatment in the hot room had caused to open. In the best
+gymnasium circles it is held to be a fine thing to have these educated
+pores, but I am sure it can be overdone, and personally I cannot say that
+I particularly enjoyed it. I kept it up largely for their sake. They
+became highly trained, but developed temperament. They were apt to get the
+signals mixed and open unexpectedly on the street, resulting in bad colds
+for me.</p>
+
+<p>For six weeks, on every week day from three to five P.M. I maintained this
+schedule religiously&mdash;at least I used a good many religious words while so
+engaged&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;This,&quot; I said bitterly to myself&mdash;&quot;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!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>And I'd use care about crossing a county bridge at any gait faster than a
+walk.</p>
+
+<p>Now this continued for years and years, and then here a few months ago
+something else happened. And on top of that something else&mdash;to wit: The
+Great Reduction.</p>
+
+<p>Of the Great Reduction more anon.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VI" id="CHAPTER_VI" /><span class='smcap'>chapter vi</span></h2>
+
+<h2><i>More Anon</i></h2>
+
+
+<p>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&mdash;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!</p>
+
+<p>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 Ch&acirc;teau-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 military
+efficiency and wearing so many medals that alongside him John Philip
+Sousa, by contrast, looks absolutely nude. His friends project him into
+the political arena and the result is summed in a phrase&mdash;&quot;Lafayette, he
+ain't there!&quot; Unavailing efforts are made by a rebellious and unreconciled
+few of us to find a presidential candidate willing to run on a platform of
+but four planks, namely: Wines, ales, liquors and cigars. Harding wins,
+Scattering second; Cox also ran: slogan: &quot;He Kept Us Out of McAdoo.&quot;
+Manhattan Island, from whence the rest of the country derives its panics,
+its jazz tremblors and its girl shows, develops a severe sinking sensation
+in the pit of its financial stomach, accompanied by acute darting pains
+at the juncture of Broad and Wall. This is the way Thomas Carlyle used to
+start off a new chapter, and I like it. It denotes erudition. Ziegfeld
+builds a new Follies show around twelve pairs of winsome knee joints.
+North Dakota blows down the Nonpartisan League and discovers that darned
+thing was loaded in both barrels. The Prussians are pained to note that
+for some reason or other a number of people seem to harbor a grudge
+against them. Nine thousand Kentucky mint patches are plowed under and the
+sites sown with rosemary; that's for remembrance. In New York plans are
+undertaken for construing the Eighteenth Amendment along the lines of the
+selective draft, upon the theory that booze is a bad thing for some people
+and much too good for many of the others. The word &quot;intrigued&quot; creeps into
+our language and becomes common property, but the fiction writers saw it
+first. A business men's cabinet, composed almost exclusively of
+politicians, succeeds a business men's cabinet composed almost
+exclusively of politicians. In order to hurry along the payment of
+Installment One of the Indemnity France whistles up the reserves and that
+chore is chored. Pessimists, including many of the old-line Democrats,
+practically all the maltsters, and Aunt Emma Goldman, are filled with a
+dismal conviction that creation has gone plum' to perdition in a hand
+basket. Those more optimistically inclined look upon the brighter side of
+things and distill consolation from the thought that nothing is so bad but
+what it might have been worse&mdash;Trotzky might have been born twins. Great
+Britain has her post-war industrial crisis, Serial Number 24. The Sinn
+F&eacute;in enlarges the British national anthem to read God Save the King Till
+We Can Get at Him! By a strict party vote Congress decides the share in
+the victory achieved by the A.E.F. was overwhelmingly Republican, but that
+the airship program went heavily Democratic. Popular distrust of
+home-brew recipes assumes a nationwide phase. This brings us up to the
+early spring of this year of grace, 1921, which is what I have been aiming
+for all through this paragraph.</p>
+
+<p>Quite without warning, I discovered along about the first of March that
+something ailed me; something was rocking the boat. About my heart there
+was a sense of pressure, so it seemed to me, or else my imagination was at
+fault. Mentally, I found myself&mdash;well, for lack of a better word to
+express it&mdash;logy. Otherwise, in all physical regards, I felt as brisk and
+peart as ever I have, despite the circumstance of having reached the age
+when a great many of us are confronted by the distressing discovery that
+we are rapidly getting no younger.</p>
+
+<p>Now when a man who has always enjoyed such outrageously perfect health as
+it has been my good fortune to enjoy takes note that certain nagging
+manifestations are persisting within him it is his duty, or least it
+should be his duty, to try to find out the underlying cause of whatever
+it is that distresses him and correct the trouble before it becomes
+chronic.</p>
+
+<p>I did not get frightened&mdash;I trust I am not a self-alarmist&mdash;but I did get
+worried. I made up my mind that I would not wait, as those who approach
+middle age so often do, for the medical examiner of an insurance company
+to scare me into sudden conniption fits. But I also made up my mind that I
+would find out what radically was wrong with me, if anything, and endeavor
+to master it while the mastering was good.</p>
+
+<p>This, though, was after I had harked back to the days of my adolescence. I
+was born down on the northern edge of the southern range of the North
+American malaria belt; and when I was growing up, if one seemed
+intellectually torpid or became filled with an overpowering bodily
+languor, the indisposition always was diagnosed offhand as a touch of
+malaria. Accordingly, the victim, taking his own advice or another's,
+jolted his liver with calomel until the poor thing flinched every time a
+strange pill was seen approaching it, and then he rounded out the course
+of treatment with all the quinine the traffic would stand. Recalling these
+early campaigns, I borrowed of their strategy for use against my present
+symptoms&mdash;if symptoms they were. I took quinine until my ears rang so that
+persons passing me on the public highway would halt to listen to the
+chimes. My head was filled with mysterious muffled rumblings. It was like
+living in a haunted house and being one at the same time.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VII" id="CHAPTER_VII" /><span class='smcap'>chapter vii</span></h2>
+
+<h2><i>Office Visits, $10</i></h2>
+
+
+<p>It required all of two weeks of experimenting with my interior to convince
+me that whatever it might be that annoyed me, it surely was not a thing
+which an intensive bombardment of the liver would cure. The liver has a
+low visibility but is easy to hit.</p>
+
+<p>I had the aversion to seeking professional guidance for the curing of a
+presumably minor disorder that most robust male adults have. In personal
+tribute I may add that I have never been hypochondriac in any possible
+respect. However, toward the end of those three weeks I formed the
+decision that I would go to see a doctor or so. But I would sneak up on
+these gentlemen, so to speak. I would call upon them in the r&ocirc;le of a
+friend rather than avowedly as a prospective patient, and take them into
+my confidence, as it were, by degrees. Somewhere in the back part of my
+brain I nursed a persistent fear that my complaints might be diagnosed as
+symptoms of that incurable malady known as being forty-four years old,
+going, on forty-five. And I knew that much already without paying a
+physician twenty-five dollars for telling me so the first time and ten
+dollars for each time he told it to me over again.</p>
+
+<p>Rather shamefacedly, with a well-simulated air of casualness, I dropped in
+upon a physician who is a friend of mine and in whose judgment I have
+confidence; and then, after a two-day interval, I went to see a second
+physician of my acquaintance who, I believe, also thoroughly knows his
+trade. With both men I followed the same tactics&mdash;roundabout chatting on
+the topic of this or that, and finally an honest confession as to the real
+purpose of my visit. In both instances the results were practically
+identical. Each man manifested an almost morbid curiosity touching on my
+personal habits and bodily idiosyncrasies. Each asked me a lot of
+questions. Each went at me with X-ray machines and blood tests and
+chemical analysissies&mdash;if there isn't any such word I claim there should
+be&mdash;until my being was practically an open book to him and I had no
+secrets left at all.</p>
+
+<p>And the upshot of all this was that each of them told me that though
+organically I was as sound as a nut in fact much sounder than some of the
+nuts they knew professionally&mdash;I was carrying an overload of avoirdupois
+about with me. In other words, I was too fat for my own good. I was eating
+too much sweet stuff and entirely too much starch&mdash;especially starch. They
+agreed on this point emphatically. As well as I could gather, I was
+subjecting my interior to that highly shellacked gloss which is peculiar
+to the bosom of the old-fashioned full-dress or burying shirt upon its
+return from the steam laundry, when what my system really called for was
+the dull domestic finish.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Well, doc,&quot; I said upon hearing this for the second time in language
+which already had a familiar sound&mdash;&quot;well, all that you say being true,
+what then?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;For one thing, more exercise.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;But I take plenty of exercise now.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;For example, what?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;For example, golf.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;How often do you play golf?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Well, not so very often, as the real golf-bug or caddie's worm would
+measure the thing&mdash;say, on an average of once a week in the golfing
+season. But I take so many swings at the ball before hitting it that I
+figure I get more exercise out of the game than do those who play oftener
+but take only about one wallop at the pill in driving off. And when I
+drive into the deep grass, as is my wont, my work with the niblick would
+make you think of somebody bailing out a sinking boat. My bunker exercises
+are frequently what you might call violent. And in the fall of the year I
+do a lot of tramping about in the woods with a gun. I might add that on a
+hunting trip I can walk many a skinny person into a state of total
+exhaustion.&quot; I stated this last pridefully.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;All right for that, then,&quot; he said. &quot;We'll concede that you get an
+abundance of exercise. Then there is another thing you should do, and of
+the two this is by far the more essential&mdash;you should go on a diet.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Right there I turned mentally rebellious. I wanted to reduce my bulk, but
+I did not want to reduce my provender. I offered counter-arguments in
+defense. I pointed but that for perhaps five years past my weight
+practically had been stationary. Also I called attention to the fact that
+I no longer ate so heavily as once I had. Not that I wished actually to
+decry my appetite. It had been a good friend to me and not for worlds
+would I slander it. I have a sincere conviction that age cannot wither nor
+custom stale my infinite gastric juices. Never, I trust, will there come a
+time when I shan't relish my victuals or when I'll feel disinclined to
+chase the last fugitive bite around and around the plate until I overtake
+it. But I presented the claim, which was quite true, that I was not the
+consumer, measured by volume, I once had been. Perhaps my freighterage
+spaces, with passing years, had grown less expansive or less accommodating
+or something.</p>
+
+<p>Likewise, I invited his consideration of the fact, which was not to be
+gainsaid either, that many men very much less elaborated than I in girth
+customarily ate very much more than I did. I recalled, offhand, sundry
+conspicuous examples of this sort. I believe I mentioned one or two such.
+For instance, now, there was Mr. William Jennings Bryan. The Bryan
+appetite, as I remarked to the doctor, is one of the chief landmarks of
+Mr. Bryan's home city of Lincoln, Nebraska. They take the sight-seeing
+tourists around to have a look at it, the first thing.</p>
+
+<p>To observe Mr. Bryan breakfasting on the morning when a national
+Democratic convention is in session is a sight worth seeing. A double
+order of cantaloupes on the half shell, a derby hat full of oatmeal, a
+rosary of sausages, and about as many flapjacks as would be required to
+tessellate the floor of a fair-sized reception hall is nothing at all for
+him. And when he has concluded his meal he gets briskly up and strolls
+around to the convention hall and makes a better speech and a longer one
+and a louder pile than anybody. Naturally, time, the insatiable remodeler,
+has worked some outward changes in Mr. Bryan since the brave old days of
+the cross of gold. His hair, chafed by the constant pressure of the halo,
+has retreated up and ever up his scalp until the forehead extends clear
+over and down upon the sunset slope. The little fine wrinkles are thickly
+smocked at the corners of the eagle eyes that flashed so fiercely at the
+cringing plutocrats.</p>
+
+<p>But his bearing is just as graceful and his voice just as silvery and as
+strong as when in '96 he advocated free silver to save the race, or when
+he advocated anti-expansion in the Philippines, or government ownership
+of the railroads, or a policy of nonpreparedness for war when Germany
+first began acting up&mdash;Grover Cleveland Bergdoll felt the same way about
+it and so did Ma Bergdoll;&mdash;and I, for one, have no doubt that Mr. Bryan
+will be just as supple, mentally and physically, three years hence when,
+if he runs true to form, he will be advocating yet another of that series
+of those immemorial Jeffersonian principles of the fathers, which he
+thinks up, to order, right out of his own head, when a campaign impends.
+Mr. Bryan knows how to play the political game&mdash;none better; but he
+certainly does have a large discard. That, however, is aside from the main
+issue.</p>
+
+<p>The point I sought to bring out there in the office of my friend Doctor
+So-and-so was that Mr. Bryan, to my knowledge, ate what he craved and all
+that he craved, yet did not become obese. When the occasion demanded he
+could be amply bellicose, but the accent was not upon the first two
+syllables.</p>
+
+<p>I cited similar cases further to buttress my position. I told him that
+almost the skinniest human being I ever knew had been one of the largest
+eaters. I was speaking now of John Wesley Bass, the champion raw-egg eater
+of Massac Precinct, whose triumphant career knew not pause or discomfiture
+until one day at the McCracken County fair when suddenly tragedy dire
+impended.</p>
+
+<p>He did not overextend himself in the gustatory line&mdash;that to one of John
+Wesley Bass' natural gifts and attainments well-nigh would have been
+impossible; but he betrayed a lack of caution when, having broken his
+former record by eating thirty-six raw eggs at a sitting, he climbed upon
+a steam merry-go-round, shortly thereafter falling off the spotted wooden
+giraffe which he rode, and being removed to the city hospital in an
+unconscious condition.</p>
+
+<p>That night later when the crisis had passed the doctors said that as
+nearly as they could figure out a case so unusual, Mr. Bass had had a
+very close call from being just naturally scrambled to death. I spoke at
+length of my former fellow townsman's powers, dwelling heavily upon the
+fact that, despite all, he never thickened up at the waistline. Throughout
+the narrative, however, the doctor punctuated my periods with derisive
+snorts which were disconcerting to an orderly presentation of the facts.
+Nevertheless, I continued until I had reached what I regarded as a telling
+climax.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Piffle!&quot; he rejoined. &quot;One hoarse raucous piffle and three sharp decisive
+puffs for your arguments! I tell you that what ails you is this: You are
+now registering, the preliminary warnings of obesity. The danger is not
+actually here yet; but for you Nature already has set the danger signals.
+There's a red light on the switch for one I. Cobb. You are due before a
+great while for a head-end collision with your own health. You can take my
+advice or you can let it alone. That's entirely up to you. Only don't
+blame me if you come back here some day all telescoped up amidships.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;And please don't consume time which is reasonably valuable to me, however
+lightly you may regard it, by telling me now about slim men who eat more
+than you do and yet keep their figures. The woods are full of them; also
+the owl wagons. The difference between such men as those you have
+described and such men as you is that they were made to be thin men and to
+keep on being thin men regardless of their food consumption, and that your
+sort are naturally predisposed to fatness. You can't judge their cases by
+yours any more than you can judge the blood-sweating behemoth of Holy Writ
+by the plans and specifications of the humble earwig.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;One man's meat is another man's poison; that's a true saying. And here's
+another saying&mdash;one cannot eat his cake and have it, too. But that's an
+error so far as you are concerned. The trouble with you is that when you
+eat your cake you still have it&mdash;in layers of fat. If you want to get rid
+of the layers you'll have to cut out the cake, or most of it, anyway. Must
+I make you a diagram, or is this plain enough for your understanding?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>It was&mdash;abundantly. But I still had one more bright little idea waiting in
+the second-line trenches. I called up the reserves.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Ahem!&quot; I said. &quot;Well now, old man, how about trying some of these
+electrical treatments or these chemicalized baths or these remedies I see
+advertised? I was reading only the other day where one successful operator
+promised on his word of honor to take off flesh for anybody, no matter who
+it was, without interfering with that person's table habits and customs.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>My friend can be very plain-spoken when the spirit moves him.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter">
+<a name="x073" id="x073"></a>
+<img src="images/x073.jpg"
+alt="&quot;you are now registering the preliminary warnings&mdash;&quot;"
+title="&quot;you are now registering the preliminary warnings&mdash;&quot;" />
+<br /><span class="caption">&quot;you are now registering the preliminary warnings&mdash;&quot;</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>&quot;Say, listen to me,&quot; he snapped, &quot;or better still, you'd better write down
+what I'm about to say and stick it in your hat where you can find it and
+consult it when your mind begins wandering again. Those special
+mechanical devices to reduce fat people are contrived for the benefit of
+men and lazy women who are too slothful to take exercise or else too
+besotted in the matter of food indulgence to face the alternative of
+dieting. They may not do any harm&mdash;properly operated, they probably do
+not&mdash;but, at best, I would regard them as being merely temporary
+expedients specially devised as first aid to the incurably lazy.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;And as for pills and boluses and bottled goods guaranteed to reduce your
+weight, and as for all these patented treatments and proprietary
+preparations which you see boosted in the papers&mdash;bah! Either they are
+harmless mixtures, in which event they'll probably do you no serious
+injury, but will certainly do you no real good; or else they contain drugs
+which, taken to excess, may cut you down in size, but have the added
+drawback of very probably cutting short your life.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;No, sir-ree! For you it's dieting, now and from now on. You may be able
+to relax your diet in time, but you can never altogether forego it. Give
+us this day our daily diet&mdash;that's your proper prayer. And you'd better
+start praying pretty soon, too!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;All right, doc,&quot; I said resignedly. &quot;You've practically converted me. I
+can't say I'm happy over the prospect, but if you say so I'm prepared to
+become a true believer. But since, between us, we're about to take all the
+joy out of life, let's be thorough. What must I do to be saved? Give me
+the horrible details right here. I might as well hear the worst at one
+session.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I'm no dietitian,&quot; he said. &quot;I don't profess to be one. That's not my
+line&mdash;my line is the diagnostic. Of course I could lay down a few broad
+general rules for your guidance&mdash;any experienced practitioner could do
+that&mdash;but to get the best returns you should consult a diet specialist.
+However, in parting&mdash;I have several paying guests waiting for me and we
+are now about to part&mdash;I will throw in one more bit of advice without
+charge. No matter what suggestions you may get from any quarter, I would
+urge you not to follow any banting formula so rigorous as to take off your
+superfluous flesh very rapidly. Take your time about it. If you live as
+long as both of us hope you may you'll have plenty of time. There's no
+rush, so go at it gradually. Be regular about it, but don't be too
+ambitious at the outset. Don't try to turn yourself into a tricky sprite
+in two weeks. For a fat man too abruptly to strip the flesh off his bones
+I regard as dangerous. It weakens him and depletes his powers of
+resistance and makes him fair game for any stray microbe which may be
+cruising about looking for a place to set up housekeeping.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>At first blush it might appear to the lay mind that a germ would scarcely
+care to pick a bone when it had fat meat to feed on, but my own
+recollections bore out my friend's statements. I remembered a man of my
+acquaintance, an enormously fleshy and unwieldy man, who, fearing
+apoplexy, undertook a radical scheme of banting. He lost fifty pounds in
+three months, so apoplexy did not get him, but pneumonia did with great
+suddenness. He was sick only three days. Nobody suspected that he was
+seriously ill until the third day, when suddenly he just hauled off and
+died.</p>
+
+<p>So I promised to have a care against seeking to hurry myself right out of
+the flounder class and right into the smelt division.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VIII" id="CHAPTER_VIII" /><span class='smcap'>chapter viii</span></h2>
+
+<h2><i>The Friendly Sons of the Boiled Spinach</i></h2>
+
+
+<p>My friend gave me the names of several men of acknowledged standing and
+told me I should be making no mistake did I put myself in the hands of any
+one on the list. I thanked him and departed from his presence. To the
+casual eye I may have seemed, going away, to be in high spirits; but,
+confidentially, I wasn't feeling so very brash. My spirits were low. I had
+heard the truth&mdash;I made no effort to deceive myself there&mdash;but the truth
+was painful.</p>
+
+<p>Still, knowing what I should do, I hesitated, temporizing with myself. I
+gave a couple of days of intensive meditation to the subject, and then I
+reached this conclusion: I would read a few standard and orthodox works
+on dietetics, and, so doing, try to arrive at least at a superficial
+knowledge of the matter. Also, I would balance what one recognized
+authority said as against what another recognized authority said, and
+then, before going to a specialist, I would do a little personal
+experimenting with my diet and mark the effects.</p>
+
+<p>I arrived at this decision privately, taking no one into my confidence.
+And without an intent to deprive any hard-worked specialist of a
+prospective fee, I shall ever continue to believe that the second part of
+the course I chose to follow was a wise one. It might not serve my
+brother-in-obesity, but it served me well. I'm sure of that.</p>
+
+<p>But the first part of the system naturally came first. This had to do with
+research work among the best authorities. Here I struck one of the snags
+that rise in the pathway of the hardy soul who goes adventuring into any
+given department of the science of medicine and its allied sciences. I was
+pained to observe how rare it was for two experts, of whatsoever period,
+to agree upon a single essential element. An amateur investigator was left
+at a loss to fathom why such entirely opposite conclusions should have
+been arrived at by the members of the same school when presumably both had
+had the same raw materials to work on. By their raw materials I mean their
+patients. But so it was.</p>
+
+<p>The ancient apostles of dietetics, the original pathfinders into a
+hitherto untracked field, had disciples who set out to follow in their
+footsteps, but before they had traveled very far along the alimentary
+trail the disciples were quarreling bitterly with the masters' deductions
+and conclusions. To-day's school was snooty touching on the major opinions
+of yesterday's crowd, and to-morrow's crowd already made faces at
+to-day's.</p>
+
+<p>On just two points I found a unanimity of opinion among what might be
+termed the middle group of dietetic explorers as counter-distinguished
+from the pioneering cult and the modern or comparatively modern. Each one
+was so absolutely certain that he was so absolutely right and so
+absolutely certain that all his contemporaries were so absolutely wrong.</p>
+
+<p>At the beginning, it seemed, a reduction of the sufferer's flesh had been
+attempted by the simple device of bleeding him copiously&mdash;not with a
+monthly statement, as latterly, but with a lancet. Abundant drinking of
+vinegar also had been recommended as a means to accomplish the desired
+end. They were noble drinkers in the olden times, but until I began
+delving into literature of the subject I did not suspect that there had
+been any out-and-out vinegar topers.</p>
+
+<p>There was citation in an early work of the interesting case of the Marquis
+of Cortona, a subchieftain under the Duke of Alva, and a fine fat old
+butcher he must have been, too, by all tellings. Finding himself grown so
+rotund that no longer could he enter with zest into the massacre bees and
+torture outings which the Spaniards were carrying on in the harried
+Netherlands, the marquis had recourse to vinegar; and so efficacious was
+the treatment that, as the tradition runs, he soon could wrap his loosened
+skin about him in great slack folds like a cloak, and thus, close-reefed,
+go merrily murdering his way across the Low Countries.</p>
+
+<p>One pictures the advantages accruing. In cold weather, now, he might
+overlap his wrinkles in a clapboarded effect and save the expense of
+laying in heavy underwear. True, this might give to the wearer a
+clinker-built appearance; still it would keep him nice and warm, and no
+doubt he had his armor on outside the rest of his things. But likewise
+there must have been drawbacks. Suppose, now, the marquis were caught out
+in blowy weather and the wind worked in under his tucks and the ratlines
+pulled loose and, all full-rigged and helpless, bellying and billowing and
+flapping and jibing, he went scudding against his will before the gale.
+Could he hope to tack and go about before he blew clear over into the next
+county? I doubt it.</p>
+
+<p>And suppose he inflated himself for a party or a reception or something,
+and a practical joker put a tack in a chair and he sat down on it and had
+a blow-out. The thought is not a pretty one, yet the thing were possible.</p>
+
+<p>From these crude beginnings I worked my way down toward the present day.
+Doctor Banting, of England, the father of latter-day dietetics from whose
+name in commemoration of his services to mankind we derive the verb
+intransitive &quot;to bant,&quot; had theories wherein his chief contemporaneous
+German rival, Epstein the Bavarian, radically disagreed with him. Voit,
+coming along subsequently, disagreed in important details with both. Among
+the moderns I discerned where Dr. Woods Hutchinson had his pet ideas and
+Doctor Wiley had his, diametrically opposed. So it went. There was almost
+as much of disputation here as there is when a federation of women's
+clubs is holding an annual election. It was all so very confusing to one
+aiming to do the right thing.</p>
+
+<p>One learned savant flatly laid down the ultimatum that the individual
+seeking to reduce should cut out all pork products from chitterings clear
+through the list to headcheese and give his undivided support to the red
+meats and the white. One of his brethren was equally positive that I might
+partake of bacon and even ham in moderation, but urged that I walk around
+red meat as though it were a pesthouse. Yet a third&mdash;a foe, plainly, to
+the butcher, but a well-wisher to the hay-and-produce dealer if ever one
+lived&mdash;recommended that I should eliminate all meat of whatsoever
+character or color and stick closely to fodder, roughage and processed
+ensilage. I judge he sent his more desperate cases to a livery stable.</p>
+
+<p>According to one dictum, bread was all right up to a certain point, and,
+according to another, all wrong. This man here held a brief for beans,
+especially the succulent baked bean; that man yonder served solemn warning
+upon me that if perversely I persisted to continue to eat baked beans the
+fat globules would form so fast I would have the sensation that a little
+boy was inside of me somewhere blowing bubbles. The writer didn't exactly
+say this, but it was the inference I drew from his remarks.</p>
+
+<p>Eat dried fruits until your seams give, said Doctor A. Avoid dried fruits
+as you would the plague, counseled the equally eminent Doctor B. Professor
+C considered the drinking of water with meals highly inadvisable; whereas
+Professor D said that without adding an extra ounce of weight I might
+consume water until my fluid contents sloshed up and down in me when I
+walked, and merely by getting a young lady in Oriental costume to stand
+alongside me I might qualify at a Sunday-school entertainment for the
+entire supporting cast of the familiar tableau entitled Rebecca at the
+Well. He intimated that just so I stopped short of committing suicide as
+an inside job all would be fine and dandy. I do not claim that these were
+his words; this is the free interpretation of his meaning. Sink the knife
+in the butter to the very hilt&mdash;there will be no ill effects but only a
+beneficial outcome&mdash;declares such-and-such a food faddist. Eschew butter
+by all means or accept the consequences, clarions an earnest voice. Well,
+I never was much of a hand for eschewed butter anyway. We keep our own cow
+and make our own butter and it seems to slip down, just so.</p>
+
+<p>In the vegetable kingdom the controversy raged with unabated fury. The
+boiled prune, blandest and most inoffensive of breakfast dishes, formed
+the basis of a spirited debate. There were pro-prunists and there were
+con-prunists. The parsnip had its champions and its antagonists; the
+carrot its defenders and its assailants. In this quarter was the cabbage
+heartily indorsed, there was it belittled and made naught of. The
+sprightly spring onion, already socially scorned in some of the best lay
+circles, suffered attack at the hands of at least one scientific and
+scholarly professional.</p>
+
+<p>After reading his strictures I remarked to myself that really there
+remained but one field of useful popularity for the onion to adorn; in
+time it might hope to supplant the sunflower as the floral emblem of
+Kansas, as typifying a great political principle which originated in that
+state: The Initiative, when one took a chance and ate a young onion; the
+Referendum, while one's digestive apparatus wrestled with it; the Recall,
+if it disagreed with one. Alone, of all the vegetables, stood spinach,
+with not a single detractor. On this issue the vote in the affirmative
+practically was by acclamation. I am tin position to state that boiled
+spinach has not an enemy among the experts. This seems but fair&mdash;it has so
+few friends among the eating public.</p>
+
+<p>I observed much and confusing talk of the value of nitrogens, proteids
+and&mdash;when I had reached the ultra-modernists&mdash;vitamines. Vitamines, I
+gathered, had only recently been discovered, yet by the progressives they
+were held to be of the supremest importance in the equation of properly
+balanced human sustenance. To my knowledge I had never consciously eaten
+vitamines unless a vitamine was what gave guaranteed strictly fresh string
+beans, as served at a table-d'h&ocirc;te restaurant, that peculiar flavor. Here
+all along I had figured it was the tinny taste of the can, which shows how
+ignorant one may be touching on vitally important matters. I visualized a
+suitable luncheon for one banting according to the newest and most
+generally approved formula:</p>
+
+<p class="center">
+<b>RELISH</b><br />
+<span class='smcap'>Mixed Gelatinoids</span><br />
+<br />
+<b>POTAGE</b><br />
+<span class='smcap'>Strained Nitrogen Gumbo</span><br />
+<br />
+<b>ENTREE</b><br />
+<span class='smcap'>Grilled Proteids With Globulin Patties</span><br />
+<br />
+<b>DESSERT</b><br />
+<span class='smcap'>Compote Of Assorted Vitamines</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>Or the alternative course for one sincerely desirous of reducing, who
+believed everything he saw in print, was to cut out all the proscribed
+articles of food&mdash;which meant everything edible except spinach&mdash;and starve
+gracefully on a diet composed exclusively of boiled spinach, with the
+prospect of dying a dark green death in from three to six weeks and
+providing one's own protective coloration if entombed in a cemetery
+containing cedars.</p>
+
+<p>Personally I was not favorably inclined toward either plan, so I elected
+to let my conscience be my guide, backed by personal observation and
+personal experimentation. I was traveling pretty constantly this past
+spring, and in the smoking compartments of the Pullmans, where all men,
+for some curious reason, grow garrulous and confidential, I put crafty
+leading questions to such of my fellow travelers as were over-sized and
+made mental notes of their answers for my own subsequent use. Since the
+Eighteenth Amendment put the nineteenth hole out of commission,
+prohibition and how to evade it are the commonest of all conversational
+topics among those moving about from place to place in America; but the
+subject of what a man eats, and more particularly what he eats for
+breakfast, runs it a close second for popularity.</p>
+
+<p>For example, there is the seasoned trans-atlantic tourist who, on the
+occasion of a certain terrifically stormy passage, was for three days the
+only person on board excepting the captain who never missed a single meal.
+You find him everywhere; there must be a million or more of him; and he
+loves to talk about it, and he does.</p>
+
+<p>But even more frequently encountered is the veteran drummer&mdash;no, beg
+pardon, the veteran district sales manager, for there aren't any drummers
+any more, or even any traveling salesmen; but instead we have district
+sales managers featuring strong selling points&mdash;I say, even more
+frequently encountered is the veteran district sales manager, wearing a
+gravy-colored waistcoat if a tasty dresser, or a waistcoat of a
+nongravy-colored or contrasting shade if careless, who craves to tell
+strangers what, customarily, he eats for breakfast.</p>
+
+<p>I made it a point to study the proportions and hearken to the disclosures
+of such a one, and if he carried his stomach in a hanging-garden effect,
+with terraces rippling down and flying buttresses and all; and if he had a
+pasty, unhealthy complexion or an apoplectic tint to his skin I said to
+myself that thenceforth I should apply the reverse English to his favorite
+matutinal prescription.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_IX" id="CHAPTER_IX" /><span class='smcap'>chapter ix</span></h2>
+
+<h2><i>Adventure of The Fallen Egg</i></h2>
+
+
+<p>So, having mapped out my campaign of attack against my fat, I rose one
+morning from my berth in the sleeping car and I dressed; and firmly
+clutching my new-formed resolution to prevent its escape, I made my way to
+the dining car and sat down and gave my order to the affable honor
+graduate of Tuskegee Institute who graciously deigned to wait on me.</p>
+
+<p>Now, theretofore, for so far back as I remembered, breakfast had been my
+heartiest meal of the entire day, with perhaps two exceptions&mdash;luncheon
+and dinner. Precedent inclined me toward ordering about as many pieces of
+sliced banana as would be required to button a fairly tall woman's
+princess frock all the way down her back, with plenty of sugar and cream,
+and likewise a large porringer of some standard glutinous cereal, to be
+followed by sausages with buckwheat cakes and a few odd kickshaws and
+comfits in the way of strawberry preserves and hot buttered toast and
+coffee that was half cream, and first one thing and then another. But
+Spartanlike I put temptation sternly behind me and told the officiating
+collegian to bring me plain boiled prunes, coffee with hot milk and
+saccharin tablets, dry toast and one dropped egg.</p>
+
+<p>The prunes and the coffee were according to specifications, although,
+lacking the customary cream and three lumps of sugar, the coffee was in
+the nature of a profound disappointment. But a superficial inquiry
+convinced me that the egg was not properly a dropped egg at all.</p>
+
+<p>Here was a fallen egg, if I ever saw one. I was filled with pity for
+it&mdash;poor, forsaken, abandoned thing, with none to speak a kind word for
+it! And probably more sinned against than sinning, too. Perhaps there was
+hereditary influences to be reckoned with. Perhaps its producer had been
+incubator raised, with no mother to guide her and only the Standard Oil
+Company for a foster parent. And what would a New Jersey corporation know
+about raising a hen?</p>
+
+<p>Thus in sudden compassion I mused. To the waiter, though, I said:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;There has been a mistake here, alumnus. This egg never was meant to be
+dropped&mdash;it was meant to be thrown. Kindly remove the melancholy
+evidences.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>He offered to provide a substitute, but the edge of my zest seemed dulled.
+I made dry toast the climax of my chastely simple repast. It was simple
+and it was chaste, but otherwise not altogether what I should characterize
+as a successful repast. It lacked, as it were.</p>
+
+<p>Let us pass along to noontime. Ere noontime came I was consumed with
+gnawing pains of emptiness. As nearly as I might judge, I contained naught
+save vast hollow spaces and acoustics and vacuums and empty, echoing,
+neglected convolutions. Sorely was I tempted to relax the rigors of the
+just-inaugurated r&eacute;gime; nobly, though, I resisted the impulse.</p>
+
+<p>As I look back now on that day I find the memory of my suffering has
+dimmed slightly. The passage of weeks and months has served to soften the
+harsh outlines of poignant recollection. What now in retrospect most
+impresses me is the heroism I displayed, the stark fortitude, the grandeur
+of will power, the triumph for character. Sheer gallantry, I call it.</p>
+
+<p>For my midday meal I had more dry toast, a reduced portion of boiled
+tongue and a raw apple&mdash;satisfying enough to some, I grant you, but to me
+no more than a tease to my palate. Long before three o'clock I knew
+exactly how a tapeworm feels when its landlord goes on a hunger strike.
+Every salivary gland I owned was standing on tiptoe screaming for help;
+every little mucous membrane had a sorrow all its own. Each separate
+fiber of my innermost being cried out for greases and for sugars and for
+the wonted starchy compounds for to stay it and for to comfort it.</p>
+
+<p>I underwent pangs such as had not been mine since away back yonder in
+August of 1914, in the time of the sack of Belgium, when the Germans
+locked up five of us for a day and a night in a cow stable where no
+self-respecting cow would voluntarily have stayed, and, then sent us by
+train under guard on a three-day journey into Germany, yet all the while
+kept right on telling us we were not prisoners but guests of the German
+Army. And at the end of the third day we reached the unanimous conclusion
+among ourselves that the only outstanding distinction we could see, from
+where we sat, between being prisoners of the German Army and guests of the
+German Army was that from time to time they did feed the prisoners. For
+throughout the journey the eight of us&mdash;since by now our little party had
+grown&mdash;lived rather simply and frugally and, I might say, sketchily on
+rations consisting of one loaf of soldiers' bread, one bottle of mineral
+water and a one-pound pot of sour and rancid honey which must have
+emanated in the first place from a lot of very morbid, low-minded bees.</p>
+
+<p>However, in those exciting days there were many little moving distractions
+about to keep one from brooding o'ermuch on thoughts of lacking provender.
+I boast not, but merely utter a verity, when I state that every time I
+shook myself I shifted the center of population. Where we had been the
+lesser wild life of midcontinental Europe abounded. In the matter of a
+distinction which had come to me utterly without solicitation or effort on
+my part I have no desire to brag, but in justice to myself&mdash;and my
+boarders&mdash;I must add that at that moment, of all the human beings in
+Central Europe, I was the most densely inhabited. My companions scratched
+along, doing fairly well, too; but I led the field&mdash;I was so much roomier
+than any one of them was.</p>
+
+<p>But here aboard this Pullman on this, the dedicatory day of my
+self-imposed martyrdom, I could not lose myself as I had on that former
+historic occasion in the ardor of chasing the small game of the country.
+By four o'clock in the afternoon I could appreciate the sensations of a
+conch shell on a parlor whatnot. I had a feeling that if anyone were to
+press his ear up against me he would hear a murmuring sound as of distant
+sea waves. Yet, mark you, I held bravely out, fighting still the good
+fight. This, then, was my dinner, if such it might in truth be called:
+Clear soup, a smallish slice of rare roast beef cut shaving thin, gluten
+bread sparsely buttered, a cloud of watercress no larger than a man's
+hand, another raw apple and a bit of domestic cheese&mdash;nothing rich,
+nothing exotic, no melting French <i>fromages</i>, no creamy Danish pastries.</p>
+
+<p>Only when I reached my demi-tasse, which I took straight, did I permit
+myself a touch of luxury. I lit my cigar with a genuine imported Swedish
+parlor match.</p>
+
+<p>Followed then the first comforting manifestation, the first gratefully
+registered taste of recompense for my privations. I had to speak that
+night and in a large hall, too, and I found my voice to be clearer and
+stronger than usual, and found, also, that I spoke with much less effort
+than usual. I was sure partial fasting during the day was bearing fruits
+in the evening, and I was right, as subsequent evening experiences proved
+to me. I had rather dreaded that hunger gripes would make my night a
+sleepless one, but it didn't happen. I may have dreamed longing dreams
+about victuals, but I tore off eight solid hours of unbridled and&mdash;I dare
+say&mdash;uproarious rest.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_X" id="CHAPTER_X" /><span class='smcap'>chapter x</span></h2>
+
+<h2><i>Wherein Our Hero Falters</i></h2>
+
+
+<p>Next day I kept it up, varying the first day's menus slightly, but keeping
+the bulk consumption down, roughly, to about one-half or possibly
+one-third what my rations formerly had been. Before night of the second
+day that all-gone sensation had vanished. Already I had made the agreeable
+discovery that I could get along and be reasonably happy on from 35 to 50
+per cent of what until then I had deludedly thought was required to
+nourish me. Before the week ended I felt fitter and sprier in every way
+than I had for years past; more alive, more interested in things, quicker
+on my feet and brisker in my mental processes than in a long time. The
+chronic logy, foggy feeling in my head disappeared and failed to return.
+I may add that to date it still has not returned. Relieved of pressure
+against its valves&mdash;at least I assume that was what came to pass&mdash;my heart
+began functioning as I assume a normal heart should function, and at once
+the sense of oppression in the neighborhood of the heart was gone.</p>
+
+<p>Within the same week I took most joyful note of the fact that I was losing
+flesh in the vicinities where mainly I craved to lose it amidships and at
+the throat. I still had a double chin in front, but the third one, which I
+carried behind as a spare&mdash;the one which ran all the way round my neck and
+lapped at the back like a clergyman's collar&mdash;was melting away. And unless
+I was woefully mistaken, I no longer had to fight so desperate a battle
+with the waistband of my trousers when I dressed in the mornings.</p>
+
+<p>I was not mistaken. Glory be and likewise selah! My first and second
+mezzanines were visibly shrinking. By these signs and portents was I
+stimulated to continue the campaign so auspiciously launched and so
+satisfactorily progressing.</p>
+
+<p>I shall not deny that in the second week I did some backsliding. The swing
+of the tour carried me into the South. It was the South in the splendor of
+the young springtime when the cardinal bird sang his mating song. With
+brocading dandelions each pasture gloriously became even as the Field of
+the Cloth of Gold; and lo, the beginning of the strawberry shortcake
+season overlapped the last of the smoked-hog-jowl-and-turnip-greens
+period, and the voice of the turtle was heard in the land.</p>
+
+<p>Figuratively, I was swept off my feet when a noble example of Southern
+womanhood put before my famished eyes the following items, to wit: About
+half a bushel of newly picked turnip greens, rearing islandwise above a
+sloshing sea of pot licker and supporting upon their fronded crests the
+boiled but impressive countenance of a hickory-cured shote, the whole
+being garnished with paired-off poached eggs like the topaz eyes of
+beauteous blond virgins turned soulfully heavenward; and set off by
+flankings of small piping-hot corn pones made with meal and water and salt
+and shortening, as Providence intended a proper corn pone should be made.</p>
+
+<p>Then the years rolled away like a scroll and once again was I back in the
+Kentucky foothills, a lean and lathy sprout of a kid, a limber six-foot
+length of perpendicular appetite; and it was twelve o'clock for some
+people, but it was dinner time for me!</p>
+
+<p>My glad low gurgle of anticipatory joy smothered the small inner voice of
+caution as I leaped, as it were, headlong into that bosky dell of young
+turnip greens. So, having set my feet on the downward path I backslode
+some more&mdash;for behold, what should come along then but an old-fashioned
+shortcake, fashioned of crisp biscuit dough, with more fresh strawberries
+bedded down between its multiplied and mounting layers than you could buy
+at the Fritz-Charlton for a hundred and ninety dollars.</p>
+
+<p>Right then and there was when and where I lost all I had gained in a
+fortnight of stalwart self-disciplining; rather it was where I regained
+all I haply had lost. When, gorged and comatose, I staggered from that
+fair matron's depleted table I should never have dared to trundle over a
+wooden culvert at faster than four miles an hour. Either I should have
+slowed down or waited until they could put in some re-enforced-concrete
+underpinnings.</p>
+
+<p>I was right back where I had started, and for the moment didn't care a
+darn either. Sin is glorious when you sin gloriously.</p>
+
+<p>But I rallied. I retrieved myself. However, I do not take all the credit
+to myself for this; circumstances favored me. Shortly I quitted the land
+of temptation where I had been born, and was back again up North living on
+dining cars and in hotels, with nothing more seductive to resist than
+processed pastry and machine-made shortcakes and Thousand Islands
+dressing; which made the fight all the easier to win, especially as
+regards the last named. I sometimes wonder why, with a thousand islands to
+choose from, the official salad mixer of the average hotel always picks
+the wrong one.</p>
+
+<p>I kept on. The thing proved magically easy of accomplishment. By the fit
+of my clothing, if by nothing else, I could have told that several of my
+more noticeable convexes were becoming plane surfaces and gave promise in
+due season of becoming almost concave, some of 'em. But there was other
+and convincing testimony besides. I could tell it by my physical feelings,
+by my viewpoint, by my enhanced zest for work and for play.</p>
+
+<p>Purposely, for the first month I refrained from weighing myself. When I
+did begin weighing at regular intervals I found I was losing at a rate of
+between two and three pounds a week. Moreover, I had now proved to my own
+satisfaction that within sane reasonable limitations I could resume eating
+most of the things which formerly I ate to excess and which I had
+altogether eliminated from my menus during the initiatory stages of
+dieting.</p>
+
+<p>About the time I emerged from the novitiate class I discerned yet one more
+gratifying fact. If I were in the woods, camping and fishing, or hunting
+or tramping or riding or taking any fairly arduous form of exercise, I
+could eat pretty much anything and everything, no matter how fattening it
+might be. Work in the open air whetted my appetite, but the added exertion
+burned up the waste matter so that the surplus went into bodily strength
+instead of into fatty layers. Consumption was larger, but assimilation was
+perfect.</p>
+
+<p>For my daily life at home, where I am writing this, I have cut out these
+things: All the cereals; nearly all the white bread; all the hot bread;
+practically all pastries except very light pastries; white potatoes
+absolutely; rice to a large extent; sausages and fresh pork and nearly all
+the ham; cream in my coffee and on fruits; and a few of the starchier
+vegetables.</p>
+
+<p>Of butter and of cheese and of nuts I eat perhaps one-third the amount I
+used to eat, and of meats, roughly, one-half as much as before the dawn of
+reason came. Of everything except the items I just have enumerated I eat
+as freely as I please. And when a person begins to reckon up everything
+else among the edibles&mdash;flesh, fowl, fish, berries, fruits, vegetables and
+the rest he finds quite a sizable list.</p>
+
+<p>I shall not pretend that I do not pine often for sundry tabooed things.
+Take pies, now&mdash;if there is any person alive who likes his pie better than
+I do he's the king of the pie likers, that's all. And I am desolated at
+being compelled to bar out the rice&mdash;not the gummy, glued-together,
+sticky, messy stuff which Northerners eat with milk and sugar on it, but
+real orthodox rice such as only Southerners and Chinamen and East Indians
+know how to prepare; white and fluffy and washed free of all the lurking
+library paste; with every grain standing up separate and distinct like
+well-popped corn and treated only with salt, pepper and butter, or with
+salt, pepper and gravy before being consumed.</p>
+
+<p>And as for white potatoes&mdash;well, it distresses me deeply to think that
+hereafter the Irish potato, except when I'm camping out, will be to me
+merely something to stopper the spout of a coal-oil can with, or to stab
+the office pen in on the clerk's desk in an American-plan hotel. For I
+have ever cherished the Irish potato as one of Nature's most succulent
+gifts to mankind. I like potatoes all styles and every style, French
+fried, lyonnaise, O'Brien, shoestring shape, pants-button design, hashed
+brown, creamed, mashed, stewed, souffl&eacute;&mdash;if only I knew who blew 'em
+up&mdash;and most of all, baked <i>au naturel</i> in the union suit. And I miss them
+and shall keep on missing them. But no longer do I yearn for cream in my
+coffee, now that it is out of it, and I am getting reconciled to dry toast
+for breakfast, where once upon a time only members of the justly famous
+Flap Jackson family seemed to satisfy.</p>
+
+<p>Of course I imbibe alcoholic stimulant when and where procurable. From the
+standpoint of one intent upon cutting a few running feet off the waistline
+measurements this distinctly is wrong, as full well I know. But what would
+you? I do not wish to pose as an eccentric. I have no desire to be pointed
+out as a person aiming to make himself conspicuously erratic by behaving
+differently from the run of his fellows. Since the advent of Prohibition
+nearly everybody I meet is drinking with an unbridled enthusiasm; and when
+not engaged in the act of drinking is discussing the latest and most
+approved methods of evading, circumventing and defying the Federal and
+State statutes against drinking. Therefore I drink, too. Even so, I have
+not yet succeeded in accustoming my palate to strong waters
+indiscriminately swallowed. I confess to a fear that I shall never make a
+complete success of the undertaking.</p>
+
+<p>I suppose the trouble with me is lack of desire. Prior to the attempted
+enforcement of the Eighteenth Amendment potable and vatted mixtures had
+but small lure for my palate, or my stomach, or my temperament. An
+occasional mild cocktail before a dinner, and perhaps twice a week a
+bottle of light beer or a glass of light wine with the dinner&mdash;these, in
+those old wild wicked days which ended in January, 1920, practically made
+up the tally of my habitual flirtations with the accursed Demon. In the
+springtime I might chamber an occasional mint julep, but this, really, was
+a sort of rite, a gesture of salute to the young green year. Likewise at
+Christmas time I partook sparingly of the ceremonial and traditional
+egg-nog. And once in a great while, on a bitter cold night in the winter,
+a hot apple toddy was not without its attractions. But these indulgences
+about covered the situation, alcoholically speaking, so far as I was
+concerned. For me the strong, heady vintages, whether still or sparkling,
+and the more potent distillations had mighty little appeal. Champagne, to
+me, was about the poorest substitute for good well-water that had ever
+been proposed; and the Messrs. Haig &amp; Haig never had to put on a night
+shift at the works on my account.</p>
+
+<p>Yet I came from a mid-section of the republic where in the olden days
+Bourbon whiskey was regarded as a proper staff of life. The town where I
+was born was one of the last towns below Mason &amp; Dixon's Line to stand out
+against the local option wave which had swept the smaller interior
+communities of America; and my native state of Kentucky was one of the two
+remaining states of the South, Louisiana being the other, which had not
+officially gone dry by legislative action up to the time when Br'er
+Volstead's pleasant little act went over nationally.</p>
+
+<p>While I was growing up, through boyhood, through my youth and on into
+manhood, I had the example of whiskey-drinking all about me. Many of our
+oldest and most respected families owned and operated distilleries. Some
+of them had been distillers for generations past; they were proud of the
+purity of their product. Men of all stations in life drank freely and with
+no sense of shame in their drinking. Mainly they took their'n straight or
+in toddies; in those parts, twenty years ago, the high-ball was looked
+upon with suspicion as a foreign error which had been imported by
+misguided individuals up North who didn't know any better than to drown
+good liquor in charged water. There were decanters on the sideboard; there
+were jimmy-johns in the cellar; and down at the place on the corner twenty
+standard varieties of bottled Bourbons and ryes were to be had at an
+exceedingly moderate price. Bar-rail instep, which is a fallen arch
+reversed, was a common complaint among us.</p>
+
+<p>Even elderly ladies who looked with abhorrence upon the drinking habit
+were not denied their wee bit nippy. They got it, never knowing that they
+got it. Some of them stayed pleasantly corned year in and year out and
+supposed all the time they merely were enjoying good health. For them
+stimulating tonics containing not in excess of sixty per cent of pure
+grain alcohol were provided by pious patent-medicine manufacturers in
+Chattanooga and Atlanta and Louisville&mdash;earnest-minded, philanthropic
+patriots these were, who strongly advocated the closing-up of the Rum
+Hole, which was their commonest pet name for the corner saloon, but who
+viewed with a natural repugnance those provisions of the Pure Food Act
+requiring printed confession as to fluid contents upon the labels of their
+own goods. It was no uncommon thing in the Sunny Southland to observe a
+staunch churchgoer who was an outspoken advocate of temperance rising up
+and giving three rousing hiccups for good old Dr. Bunkum's Nerve Balm. And
+distinctly I recall the occasion when a stalwart mother in Israel,
+starting off to attend a wedding and feeling the need of a little special
+toning-up beforehand, took three wineglassfuls of her favorite Blood
+Purifier instead of the customary one which she took before a meal; and,
+as a consequence, on her arrival at the scene of festivities was with
+difficulty dissuaded from snatching down the Southern smilax and other
+decorations that she might twine with them a wreath to crown herself. She
+somehow had got the idea that she was the queen emeritus of the May. It
+was reported about town afterward that she tried to do the giant swing on
+the parlor chandelier. But this was a gross exaggeration; she only tried
+to hang by her legs from it.</p>
+
+<p>Reared, as I was, amid such surroundings and in a commonwealth abounding
+in distilleries, rectifying works, blending establishments, bottle-houses,
+barrel-houses, and saloons, I should have been a hopeless inebriate long
+before I came of age. The literature of any total abstinence society
+would prove conclusively that I never had a chance to avoid filling a
+drunkard's grave. Yet somehow I escaped the fate ordained for me. As I
+say, I drank sparingly and for long periods not at all, until Prohibition
+came. Then I began doing as about ninety per cent of my fellow-adult
+Americans began doing&mdash;which was to take a drink when the opportunity
+offered. As I diagnose it, we nearly all are actuated now by much the same
+instinct which causes a small boy to loot a jam closet. He doesn't
+particularly want all that jam but he takes the jam because it is
+summarily denied him and because he's afraid he may never again get a
+whack at unlimited jam.</p>
+
+<p>To my way of thinking, the main result of the effort drastically to
+enforce Prohibition, aside from making us a nation of law-breakers,
+law-evaders, sneaks, bribers, boot-leggers, bigots, corruptionists and
+moral cowards, has been to transfer the burden of inebriety from one set
+of shoulders to another set of shoulders. Men who formerly drank to
+excess have sobered up, against their will, for lack of cash or lack of
+chance to buy hard liquor. They cannot rake together enough coin to
+purchase the adulterated stuff at ten times the price they had paid for
+better liquor before the law went into effect. On the other hand, men&mdash;and
+women&mdash;who formerly drank but little are now drinking to excess, some of
+them being prompted, I think, by a feeling of protest against what they
+regard as an invasion of their personal liberties and some, no doubt,
+inspired by a perfectly understandable impulse to do a thing which is
+forbidden when the doing of it gives them a sense of adventure and daring.</p>
+
+<p>Far be it from an humble citizen to criticise our national law-making
+body. Far be it from him, as he contemplates the spectacle frequently
+presented under the dome of the Capitol at Washington, to paraphrase Ethan
+Allen's celebrated remark when he took Fort Ticonderoga in the name of
+Jehovah and the Continental fathers and exclaim: &quot;Congress&mdash;oh, my God!&quot;
+Far be it, I repeat, from such a one to do such things as these. But I
+trust I may be pardoned for venturing the statements that excessive
+drinking already was going out of fashion in this country, that the
+treating evil was in a fair way to die a natural death anyhow, and that
+the present sumptuary attempt to cure us overnight of a habit which has
+been ingrained in the very fibre of the race for so far back as the
+history of the race runs, has only had the effect of making a bad thing
+worse.</p>
+
+<p>At that, I hold no brief for the brewer and the distiller. They got
+exactly what was coming to them. Had they, as a class, been content to
+obey the existing laws, instead of conniving to break them; had they kept
+their meddling fingers out of local politics; had they realized more fully
+their responsibilities as manufacturers and purveyors of potentially
+dangerous products; had they been willing to cooperate with right-thinking
+men in a sane and orderly campaign for the cleaning-up and the proper
+regulation of the liquor traffic; had they seen that the common man's
+inarticulate but very definite resentment against the iniquities of the
+corner saloon system was tending to the legal abolition of the whole
+business of licensed drinking, I believe we should have had no Eighteenth
+Amendment saddled upon us and no Volstead act to bridle us.</p>
+
+<p>In the final analysis, and stripping aside the lesser contributory causes,
+I maintain there were just two outstanding reasons why this country went
+dry after the fashion in which it did go dry: One reason was the
+Distiller; the other was the Brewer. And for the woes of either or both I,
+for one, decline to shed a single tear.</p>
+
+<p>How a fellow does run on when he gets on the subject which is uppermost in
+the minds of the American people this year! All I intended to say, when I
+started off on this tack, a few pages back, was that if I absolutely and
+completely cut out all alcoholic stimulant no doubt I should be reducing
+my weight much faster than is the case at this writing. To-day practically
+all the members in good standing of the Order of Friendly Sons of the
+Boiled Spinach&mdash;I mean the dietetic sharps&mdash;agree that he or she who is
+banting will be well-advised to drink not at all. For the most part they
+do not make a moral issue of this detail. Some of them refuse to concede
+that a teetotaler is necessarily healthier or happier or more useful to
+the world than the moderate imbiber is. They merely point out that
+whiskies and beers are, for the majority of humans, fattening things and
+should therefore be eliminated from the diet of those wishful to lose
+their superfluous adipose tissue. Here, again, they disagree with their
+professional forebears. The experts of the preceding generations, being
+mainly Englishmen and Germans, could not conceive of living without
+drinking. Some advocated wines, some ales, some a mixture of both with an
+occasional measure of spirits added for the sake of digestion. But among
+the dependable dietetic authorities of the present day there appears to
+be no wide range of argument on this point. They pretty generally agree
+that even a casual indulgence in beverages is not indicated for those who
+seek to reduce. I am sure they are right. But as I remarked just now, what
+can you do when you are encompassed about by the bottle-toting,
+sop-it-up-behind-the-door custom which has sprung up since Prohibition was
+slipped over on us by the Anti-Saloon League?</p>
+
+<p>I confess that I have not the strength of character to swim, almost alone,
+against the social current. So I partake of the occasional snort and to
+that extent stand a self-admitted apologist for an offense which no true
+reductionist should commit.</p>
+
+<p>But I claim that otherwise&mdash;that in so far as the solid foodstuffs are
+concerned&mdash;I have, for my own individual case, exactly the right idea
+about it.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XI" id="CHAPTER_XI" /><span class='smcap'>chapter xi</span></h2>
+
+<h2><i>Three Cheers for Lithesome Grace Regained!</i></h2>
+
+
+<p>My advice to the man or the woman who is in the same fix I was in is to go
+and do likewise, with variations to suit the individual temperament. It
+means self-denial but self-denial persevered in is a virtue, and virtue he
+will find&mdash;or she will&mdash;not alone is its own reward but a number of
+additional rewards as well. Let my late fellow sufferer likewise patronize
+the gymnasium and the steam room and the cold plunge if he so chooses. If
+he desires to have automatic pores, all right. As for me, I recall what
+the Good Book says about the pores which ye have always with ye, and I
+decline to worry about the present uncultured state of mine. Let him try
+the electric rollers and the electric baths, if such be his bent; no doubt
+they have their value. And by all means let him consult a qualified
+physician if he fears either that he is overdoing or underdoing his
+banting. Personally, though, I am satisfied with the plan I tried out, of
+being my own private test tube.</p>
+
+<p>I claim that I have better information touching on what sustenance I need
+than any outsider ever can hope to have unless he breaks into me
+surgically. I claim that a series of rational experiments should tell any
+rational human how much he needs to eat and what he needs to eat in order
+to reduce his bulk and yet keep his powers and his bodily vigor
+unimpaired. I am not speaking now, understand me, of those unfortunates
+with whom obesity is a disease, but of those who owe their grossness of
+outline to gluttony. Lacking vital statistics on the subject, I
+nevertheless dare assert that these latter constitute fully 90 per cent of
+those among the American people who are distinctly and uncomfortably and
+frequently unhealthily fat.</p>
+
+<p>Remains but one fly in the ointment. Since Tony Sarg is going to
+illustrate this treatise, then Tony must revise the old working plans. For
+my figure is not so much pro as once it was. It is more con, if you get my
+meaning&mdash;the profile curves in toward, instead of being, as formerly, so
+noticeably from.</p>
+
+<p>Still, I should worry about the troubles of an artist, even though a
+friend. I weighed myself this morning. Three months ago, when I set out to
+reduce my belt line and my collar size, I snatched the beam down ker-smack
+at two hundred and thirty-six pounds, stripped. This morning I weighed
+exactly one hundred and ninety-seven, including amalgam fillings and the
+rights of translation into foreign languages, including the Scandinavian.
+One hundred and eighty-five pounds is my ultimate aim. Howsoever, I may
+keep right on when I attain that figure and justify the title of this
+book by taking a full one third off. In either event, though, I shall
+know exactly where I am going and I'm on my way. And I feel bully and I'm
+happy about it and boastfully proud.</p>
+
+<p>Three rousing cheers for lithesome grace regained!</p>
+
+
+<h2><span class='smcap'>the end</span></h2>
+
+<p class="center">[<i>Transcriber's note: Obvious typos in this project were corrected.</i>]</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of One Third Off, by Irvin S. Cobb
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