a lot of
hard luck in keeping his relatives--they were almost constantly dying on
him and he finally had to stab himself with one of those painful-looking
old Roman two-handed swords, lest something really serious befall him.
Falstaff was fat, and he lost the favor of kings in the last act. Coming
down to our own day and turning to a point no farther away than the
White House at Washington--but have we not enough examples without
becoming personal? Yes, I know Julius Caesar said: "Let me have men
about me that are fat." But you bet it wasn't in the heated period when
J. Caesar said that!

TEETH

One of the most pleasant features about being born, as I conceive it,
is that we are born without teeth. I believe there have been a few
exceptions to this rule--Richard the Third, according to the accounts,
came into the world equipped with all his teeth and a perfectly
miserable disposition; and once in a while, especially during Roosevelt
years, when the Colonel's picture is hanging on the walls of so many
American homes, we read in the paper that a baby has just been born
somewhere with a full set, and even, as in the case of the infant son
of a former member of the Rough Riders, with nose glasses and a
close-cropped mustache. This, however, may have been a pardonable
exaggeration of the real facts. As I recall now, it was reported in a
dispatch to the New York Tribune from Lover's Leap, Iowa, during the
presidential campaign eight years ago.

In the main, though, we are born without teeth. We are born without a
number of things--clothes for example--although Anthony Comstock is said
to be pushing a law requiring all children to be born with overalls on;
but teeth is the subject which we are now discussing. This absence of
teeth tends to give the very young of our species the appearance in the
face of an old fashioned buckskin purse with the draw string broken, but
be that as it may, we are generally fairly well content with life until
the teeth begin to come.

First there are the milk teeth. Right there our troubles start. To use
the term commonly in use, we cut them, although as a matter of fact,
they cut us--cut them with the aid of some such mussy thing as a
toothing ring or the horny part of the nurse's thumb, or the reverse
side of a spoon--cut them at the cost of infinite suffering, not only
for ourselves but for everybody else in the vicinity. And about the time
we get the last one in we begin to lose t