ut a fat man with
a grouch is inexcusable in any company--there is so much of him to be
grouchy. He constitutes a wave of discontent and a period of general
depression. He is not expected to be romantic and sentimental either. It
is all right for a giraffe to be sentimental, but not a hippopotamus. If
you doubt me consult any set of natural history pictures. The giraffe is
shown with his long and sinuous neck entwined in fond embrace about the
neck of his mate; but the amphibious, blood-sweating hippo is depicted
as spouting and wallowing, morose and misanthropic, in a mud puddle
off by himself. In passing I may say that I regard this comparison as
a particularly apt one, because I know of no living creature so truly
amphibious in hot weather as an open-pored fat man, unless it is a
hippopotamus.

Oh how true is the saying that nobody loves a fat man! When fat comes up
on the front porch love jumps out of the third-story window. Love in
a cottage? Yes. Love in a rendering plant? No. A fat man's heart is
supposed to lie so far inland that the softer emotions cannot reach it
at all. Yet the fattest are the truest, if you did but know it, and
also they are the tenderest and a man with a double chin rarely leads a
double life. For one thing, it requires too much moving round.

A fat man cannot wear the clothes he would like to wear. As a race fat
men are fond of bright and cheerful colors; but no fat man can indulge
his innocent desires in this direction without grieving his family and
friends and exciting the derisive laughter of the unthinking. If he puts
on a fancy-flowered vest, they'll say he looks like a Hanging Garden
of Babylon. And yet he has a figure just made for showing off a
fancy-flowered vest to best effect. He may favor something in light
checks for his spring suit; but if he ventures abroad in a checked suit,
ribald strangers will look at him meaningly and remark to one another
that the center of population appears to be shifting again. It has
been my observation that fat men are instinctively drawn to short tan
overcoats for the early fall. But a fat man in a short tan overcoat,
strolling up the avenue of a sunny afternoon, will be constantly
overhearing persons behind him wondering why they didn't wait until
night to move the bank vault. That irks him sore; but if he turns round
to reproach them he is liable to shove an old lady or a poor blind
man off the sidewalk, and then, like as not, some gamin will