rawny kind of women." And he begins to call her pet names of
all kinds and beg her please, if she won't get off complete, to set
somewheres else a minute, fur his chest he can feel giving way, and his
ribs caving in. He called her his plump little woman three or four
times and she must of softened up some, fur she moved and his voice come
stronger, but not less meek and lowly. And he follers it up:

"Dolly, darling," he says, "I bet I know something my little woman don't
know."

"What is it?" the fat lady asts him.

"You don't know what a cruel, weak stomach your hubby has got," Watty
says, awful coaxing like, "or you wouldn't bear down quite so hard onto
it--please, Dolly!"

She begins to blubber and say he is making fun of her big size, and if
he is mean to her any more or ever looks at another woman agin she will
take anti-fat and fade away to nothing and ruin his show, and it is
awful hard to be made a joke of all her life and not have no steady home
nor nothing like other women does.

"You know I worship every pound of you, little woman," says Watty,
still coaxing. "Why can't you trust me? You know, Dolly, darling, I
wouldn't take your weight in gold for you." And he tells her they never
was but once in all his life he has so much as turned his head to look
at another woman, and that was by way of a plutonic admiration, and no
flirting intended, he says. And even then it was before he had met his
own little woman. And that other woman, he says, was plump too, fur he
wouldn't never look at none but a plump woman.

"What did she weigh?" asts Watty's wife. He tells her a measly little
three hundred pound.

"But she wasn't refined like my little woman," says Watty, "and when I
seen that I passed her up." And inch by inch Watty coaxed her clean off
of him.

But the next day she hearn him and Mrs. Ostrich giggling about
something, and she has a reg'lar tantrum, and jest fur meanness goes out
and falls down on the race track, pertending she has fainted, and they
can't move her no ways, not even roll her. But finally they rousted her
out of that by one of these here sprinkling carts backing up agin her
and turning loose.

But aside from them occasional mean streaks Dolly was real nice, and I
kind of got to liking her. She tells me that because she is so fat no
one won't take her serious like a human being, and she wisht she was
like other women and had a fambly. That woman wanted a baby, too, and I
bet she woul