the life raft adrift; and if he
basks at the water's edge, boats will come in and try to dock alongside
him; and if he takes a sun bath on the beach and sunburns, there's so
everlasting much of him to be sunburned that he practically amounts to a
conflagration. He can't shoot rapids, craps or big game with any degree
of comfort; nor play billiards. He can't get close enough to the table
to make the shots, and he puts all the English on himself and none of it
on the cue ball.

Consider the gainful pursuits. Think how many of them are denied to the
man who may have energy and ability but is shut out because there are a
few extra terraces on his front lawn. A fat man cannot be a leading man
in a play. Nobody desires a fat hero for a novel. A fat man cannot go
in for aeroplaning. He cannot be a wire-walker or a successful walker
of any of the other recognized brands--track, cake, sleep or floor. He
doesn't make a popular waiter. Nobody wants a fat waiter on a hot day.
True, you may make him bring your order under covered dishes, but
even so, there is still that suggestion of rain on a tin roof that is
distasteful to so many.

So I repeat that fat people are always getting the worst of it, and I
say again, of all the ills that flesh is heir to, the worst is the flesh
itself. As the poet says--"The world, the flesh and the devil"--and
there you have it in a sentence--the flesh in between, catching the
devil on one side and the jeers of the world on the other. I don't care
what Dr. Woods Hutchinson or any other thin man says! I contend that
history is studded with instances of prominent persons who lost out
because they got fat. Take Cleopatra now, the lady to whom Marc Antony
said: "I am dying, Egypt, dying," and then refrained from doing so for
about nineteen more stanzas. Cleo or Pat--she was known by both names,
I hear--did fairly well as a queen, as a coquette and as a promoter of
excursions on the river--until she fleshened up. Then she flivvered.
Doctor Johnson was a fat man and he suffered from prickly heat, and from
Boswell, and from the fact that he couldn't eat without spilling most
of the gravy on his second mezzanine landing. As a thin and spindly
stripling Napoleon altered the map of Europe and stood many nations on
their heads. It was after he had grown fat and pursy that he landed
on St. Helena and spent his last days on a barren rock, with his arms
folded, posing for steel engravings. Nero was fat, and he had