t, nay, awe-inspiring.

To me it seemed that physically I was just as active and agile as I had
been in those 'prentice years of my professional career when the ability
to shift quickly from place to place and to think with an ornithological
aptitude were conducive to a continuance of unimpaired health among young
reporters. Anyhow--thus I to myself in the same strain,
continuing--anyhow, I was not actually getting fat. Nothing so gross as
that. I merely was attaining to a pleasant, a becoming and a dignified
fullness of contour as I neared my thirtieth birthday. So why worry about
what was natural and normal among persons of my temperament, and having my
hereditary impulses, upon attaining a given age?

I am convinced that men who are getting fat are generally like that. For
every added pound an added excuse, for each multiplying inch at the
waistline a new plea in abatement to be set up in the mind. I see the
truth of it now. When you start getting fat you start getting fatuous.
With the indubitable proof of his infirmity mounting in superimposed folds
of tissues before his very gaze, with the rounded evidence presented right
there in front of him where he can rest his elbows on it, your average
fattish man nevertheless refuses to acknowledge the visible situation.
Vanity blinds his one eye, love of self-indulgence blinds the other.
Observe now how I speak in the high moral tone of a reformed offender,
which is the way of reformed offenders and other reformers the world over.
We are always most virtuous in retrospect, as the fact of the crime
recedes. Moreover, he who has not erred has but little to gloat over.

There are two sorts of evidence upon which many judges look askance--that
sort of evidence which is circumstantial and that sort which purely is
hearsay. In this connection, and departing for the space of a paragraph or
so from the main theme, I am reminded of the incident through which a
certain picturesque gentleman of the early days in California acquired a
name which he was destined to wear forever after, and under which his
memory is still affectionately encysted in the traditions of our great Far
West. I refer to the late Liver-Eating Watkins. Mr. Watkins entered into
active life and passed through a good part of it bearing the
unilluminative and commonplace first name of Elmer or Lemuel, or perhaps
it was Jasper. Just which one of these or some other I forgot now, but no
matter; at least it was some su