y
save for one figure. I see at a glance that something has happened.

"Robert has been killed in battle," he says. How near the sound of the guns
had come!

ON SHORT LEGS AND LONG LEGS

A day or two ago a soldier, returned from the front, was loudly inveighing
in a railway carriage against the bumptiousness and harshness of the
captain under whom he had served. "Let me git 'im over 'ere," he said, "and
I'll lay 'im out--see if I don't. I've 'ad enough of 'is bullyin'. It ain't
even as if 'e was a decent figure of a man. 'E don't stand more'n
five-feet-two. I could knock 'im out with one 'and, and I'd 'ave done it
before now only you mustn't out there. If you did you'd get a pound o' lead
pumped into you."

Now, I dare say little five-feet-two deserved all that was said of him, and
all he will get by way of punishment; but the point about the remark that
interests me is the contempt it revealed for the man of small stature.
There's no doubt that a little man starts with a grievance, with an
aggravating sense of an inferiority that has nothing to do with his real
merits. I know the feeling. For myself, I am just the right height--no
more, no less. I am five-feet-nine-and-a-half, and I wouldn't be a shade
different either way. I dare say that is the general experience. Every one
feels that his own is really the ideal standard. It is so in most things.
Aristotle said that a man ought to marry at thirty-eight. I think he said
it because he himself married at thirty-eight. Now, I married at
twenty-three, and my opinion is that the right age at which to get
married--if you are of the marrying sort--is twenty-three. In short,
whatever we do or whatever we are, we have a deep-rooted conviction that we
are "it." And it is well that it should be so. Without this innocent
self-satisfaction there would be a lot more misery in the world.

But though I am the perfect height of five-feet-nine-and-a-half, I always
feel depressed and out-classed in the presence of a man, say of
six-feet-two. He may be an ass, but still I have to look up to him in a
physical sense, and the mere act of looking up seems to endow him with a
moral advantage. I feel a grievance at the outrageous length of the fellow,
and find I want to make him fully understand that though I am only
five-feet-nine-and-a-half in stature, my intellectual measurement is about
ten feet, and that I am looking down on him much more than he is looking
down on me.

It