the water. For dinner she orders
everything on the menu except the date and the name of the proprietor.
She does this in order to give her strength to go on with the treatment.

No fat man would diet that way; but no matter which way he does diet it
doesn't do him any good. Health exercises only make him muscle-sore and
bring on what the Harvard ball team call the Charles W. Horse; while
banting results in attacks of those kindred complaints--the Mollie K.
Grubbs and the Fan J. Todds.

Walking is sometimes recommended and the example of the camel is pointed
out, the camel being a creature that can walk for days and days. But,
as has been said by some thinking person, who in thunder wants to be a
camel? The subject of horseback riding is also brought up frequently in
this connection. It is one of the commonest delusions among fat men
that horseback riding will bring them down and make them sylphlike and
willowy. I have several fat men among my lists of acquaintances who
labor under this fallacy. None of them was ever a natural-born horseback
rider; none of them ever will be. I like to go out of a bright morning
and take a comfortable seat on a park bench--one park bench is plenty
roomy enough if nobody else is using it--and sit there and watch these
unhappy persons passing single file along the bridle-path. I sit there
and gloat until by rights I ought to be required to take out a gloater's
license.

Mind you, I have no prejudice against horseback riding as such.
Horseback riding is all right for mounted policemen and Colonel W. F.
Cody and members of the Stickney family and the party who used to play
Mazeppa in the sterling drama of that name. That is how those persons
make their living. They are suited for it and acclimated to it. It is
also all right for equestrian statues of generals in the Civil War. But
it is not a fit employment for a fat man and especially for a fat man
who insists on trying to ride a hard-trotting horse English style, which
really isn't riding at all when you come right down to cases, but an
outdoor cure for neurasthenia invented, I take it, by a British subject
who was nervous himself and hated to stay long in one place. So, as I
was saying, I sit there on my comfortable park bench and watch
those friends of mine bouncing by, each wearing on his face that set
expression which is seen also on the faces of some men while waltzing,
and on the faces of most women when entertaining their relatives