ittle you eat. Why, there
is Mrs. Natty B. Slymm, who is beautifully thin, and she eats twice as
much as you do, and does not gain an ounce. You know positively that
eating has nothing to do with it, for one time you dieted, didn't eat a
thing but what the doctor ordered, besides your regular meals, and you
actually gained.

You are in despair about being anything but fat, and--! how you hate it.
But cheer up. I will save you; yea, even as I have saved myself and
many, many others, so will I save you.

[Sidenote: _Spirituality vs. Materiality_]

[Sidenote: _A Long, Long Battle_]

It is not in vain that all my life I have had to fight the too, too
solid. Why, I can remember when I was a child I was always being
consoled by being told that I would outgrow it, and that when I matured
I would have some shape. Never can I tell pathetically "when I was
married I weighed only one hundred eighteen, and look at me now." No, I
was a delicate slip of one hundred and sixty-five when I was taken.

I never will tell you how much I have weighed, I am so thoroughly
ashamed of it, but my normal weight is one hundred and fifty pounds, and
at one time there was seventy pounds more of me than there is now, or
has been since I knew how to control it. I was not so shameless as that
very long, and as I look back upon that short period I feel like
refunding the comfortable salary received as superintendent of an
hospital; for I know I was only sixty-five per cent efficient, for
efficiency decreases in direct proportion as excess weight increases.
Everybody knows it.

_The Meeting Is Now Open for Discussion_

Jolly Mrs. Sheesasite has the floor and wants some questions answered.
You know Mrs. Sheesasite; her husband recently bought her a pair of
freight scales.

[Sidenote: _Mrs. Sheesasite_]

"Why is it, Doctor, that thin people can eat so much more than fat
people and still not gain?"

[Sidenote: _Me Answering_]

"First: Thin people are usually more active than fat people and use up
their food.

"Second: Thin people have been proved to radiate fifty per cent more
heat per pound than fat people; in other words, fat people are regular
fireless cookers! They hold the heat in, it cannot get out through the
packing, and the food which is also contained therein goes merrily on
with fiendish regularity, depositing itself as fat.

[Illustration: Fireless Cookers.]

"And there are baby fireless cookers and children fireless cookers