t 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
Canyon 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