beauty. We may consider
it foremost among his first-rate advantages.

Seeing this huge monster of humanity bearing down upon them,
slow-wabbling, like a proboscidian mammal, fast-puffing, like a steam
locomotive, the young man lifted himself to a sitting posture, and
without any suspicion as to the true state of the case, remarked to
his companion:

"Here comes a doughty old customer, upon my word! 'What tempest, I
trow, threw this whale with so many tons of oil'----"

The young lady cleared her throat--she cleared it point-blankly.

"Excuse me, but, perhaps you do not know, that is--is--my father."

Stammering forth these words, she at the same time turned very red in
the face.

This was slightly awkward, or would have been to another. As for this
young man, he did not mind a little thing like that.

"I did not know it," he told the girl, unruffled; "I crave your
pardon. The fact is, it is an habitual failing of mine to make sport
of fat people. The lubberly clumsiness of a huge corporation of human
flesh is to me so irresistibly comic! My mother tells me a dreadful
day of retribution is coming--a day, wherein I shall be fifty and fat,
and a fit subject for the ridicule of others."

"I cannot discern the foreshadows of such a day," replied the girl,
glancing with unconscious approbation at the admirable outlines of
a figure whose proportions were well-nigh faultless. She fingered
nervously at her bonnet-strings, smiled a panic-stricken little smile,
broke out into a cold sweat of fearful expectation, and through all
the horrors of the situation, tried her best to emulate the young
man's inimitable air of cultured composure. He got up at this
juncture from the ground, not hastily, not awkwardly, but in his own
time and at his own pleasure, and standing there, entirely at his
ease, looked every inch the living exemplar of that expressive
little phrase--"don't-care."

Some persons object to being interrupted, he did not.

The girl stood up, too, but stood with such a difference! More and
more disconcerted she became with every passing second, so ashamed was
she of her unsightly old father, in his blue cotton farm clothes,
dirty and baggy, and his red cotton handkerchief--no redder than his
face--so ashamed, and with such a sense of guilt in her shame! Truth
to tell, the contrast between the two men thus confronted, was almost
startling; the bloated ungainliness of the one, the sinewy shapeliness
of the other