n to human knowledge, as showing the steady and remarkable
changes through which a man who is doomed to be fat passes onward to his
destiny. But Maltboy stopped sitting for portraits when he reached the
age of twenty, deciding, as many another public character has done, to
transmit only the earlier and more ethereal representations of himself
to posterity.

By some compensating law of Nature, there were given to Maltboy a light
and cheerful heart, a tendency to laugh on the smallest provocation, and
a nice susceptibility to the beautiful. Not the beautiful in rivers,
forests, skies, and other inanimate things, but the beautiful in woman.
And as Overtop was gifted to discover charms in material objects which
were plain in other eyes, so Maltboy possessed the wonderful faculty of
seeing beauty in female faces, where other people saw, perhaps, only a
bad nose, dull eyes, and a pinched-up mouth. This mental endowment might
have been a priceless gift to a portrait painter, who was desirous of
gratifying his sitters; but it was for Matthew Maltboy a fatal
possession. It had led him to love too many women too much at first
sight, and to shift his admiration from one dear object to another with
a suddenness and rapidity destructive to a well-ordered state
of society.

Though these multiplied transfers of affection occasionally caused some
disappointment among the victims of Mr. Maltboy's inconstancy, it was
wisely ordained that he should be the principal sufferer--that every new
passion should involve him in new difficulties, and subject him to a
degree of mental distress which would have reduced the flesh of any man
not hopelessly predisposed to fatness. As Mr. Matthew Maltboy stood by
the fire, he was not taking the profitable retrospective view of his
life which he should have taken, but was glancing with an expression of
concern at the circumference of a showy vest pattern which cut off the
view of his legs.

The apartment in which the three bachelors were keeping a meditative
silence, was large, square, high, on the first floor back, commanding an
ample prospect of neglected rear yards, and all the strange things that
are usually huddled into those strictly private domains. The furniture
of the room was rich and substantial, but not too good to be used. The
chairs were none of those frail, slippery structures of horsehair and
mahogany so inhospitably cold to the touch; but they were oak, high
backed, deep, long armed, s