urging
them to bring up the rising generation fatless. Thus only might war
cease, justice prevail, love reign, humanity rise, and a golden age come
back again to a world-wide Arcadia. Fat and Anti-Fat! Eros and Anteros,
Strophe and Antistrophe. Or, better, the old primeval tale,--Jove and
the Titans, Theseus and the Centaurs, Bellerophon and the Chimaera, Thor
and the Giants, Ormuzd and Ahriman, Good and Evil, Water and Fire, Light
and Darkness. The world has told it over from the beginning.

And do you ask what manner of man was the Fatless one? You shall see
him. His most striking feature was a fur cap,--weight some four pounds,
I should judge. I think he was born with this cap, and will die with it,
for 90 deg. Fahrenheit seemed no temptation to uncover. Boots came second in
rank, but twelfth or so in number,--weight probably on a par with the
leaded brogans of the little wind-driven poetaster of old. Between these
two extremes might be found about five feet ten of humanity, lank,
sapless, and stooping. The seedy drapery of the figure hung in lean,
reproachful wrinkles. The flabby trousers seemed to say: "Give! give!"
The hollow waistcoat murmured: "Pad, oh! pad me with hot biscuits!" The
loose coat swung and sighed for forbidden fruit: "Fill me with fat!" A
dry, coppery face found pointed expression in the nose, which hung like
a rigid sentinel over the thin-lipped mouth,--like Victor Hugo's Javert,
loyal, untiring, merciless. No traitorous comfits ever passed that
guard; no death-laden bark sailed by that sleepless quarantine. The
small ferret-eyes which looked nervously out from under bushy
brows, roaming, but never resting, were of the true Minerva
tint,--yellow-green. The encircling rings told of unsettled weather.
While elf-locks and straggling whiskers marked the man careless of
forms, the narrow, knotted brow suggested the thinker persistent in the
one idea:--

"deep on his front engraven,
Deliberation sat and _peptic_ care."

Not over beds of roses had he walked to ascend the heights. Those boots
in which he shambled along his martyr-course were filled with peas. He
had learned in suffering what he taught in sing-song. The wreath of
wormwood was his, and the statue of brass. _Io triumphe!_

His gait was a swift, uncertain shuffle, a compromise between a saunter
and a dog-trot. The arms hung straight and stiff from the narrow
shoulders, like the radii of a governor, diverging more or less