empty, and then vanished!

"When I came home I sat a long while before my den fireplace thinking.
They were right in two things, though not in the falling in love--that
was done thirty-five years ago once and for all. I wondered if I had
grown _pudgy_, dreadful word; _stout_ carries a certain dignity, but
pudgy suggests bunchy, wabbling flesh. I've noticed my gloves go on
lingeringly, clinging at the joints, but I read that to mean rheumatism!

"That night I stood before the mirror and studied my face as I unbuttoned
my vest and loosened my shirt band at the neck. Suddenly I experienced
great relief. For several months past I have felt a strange asphyxiation
and a vertigo sensation when wearing formal clothes of any kind, enjoying
complete comfort only in the loose neckcloth and wrapper of my private
hours. I had thought of asking medical advice, but having acquired a
distrust of general physic in my youth, and hoping you might come down, I
put it off.

"Unfasten your own top button, and now prepare to laugh--Martin Cortright
is not threatened with apoplexy or heart failure, he's grown _pudgy_, and
his clothes are all too small! Yet but for that boy's good-tempered
ridicule he might not have discovered it.

"Think of it, Richard! I, whom my mother considered interesting and of
somewhat distinguished mien, owing to my pallor and slim stature! A
pudgy worm belongs to chestnuts, not to books. A pudgy antiquarian is a
thing unheard of since monastic days, when annal making was not deemed
out of place if mingled with the rotund jollity of a Friar Tuck. You
must bear half the blame, for it must be the butter habit that your
Martha Corkle's fresh churned pats inoculated me with, for I always
detested the stuff before.

"Graybeard's stricture, however, struck a deeper chord--'He has material
in plenty for his book, but no vital stimulus.' This, too, is deeply
true, and I have felt it vaguely so for some time, but no more realized
it than I did my pudginess.

"No matter how much material one collects, if the vitalizing spirit is
not there, no matter how realistically the stage may be set if the actors
are mere dummies. The only use of the past is to illuminate and sustain
the present.

"Your own home life and work, the honest questions of little Richard and
Ian waken me from a long sleep, I believe, and set me thinking. What is
a man remembered by the longest? Brain work, memorial building, or heart
touching? Do you reco