panting champion of the Putnam
division.

[Illustration: TO OBSERVE MR. BRYAN BREAKFASTING IS A SIGHT WORTH SEEING.
_Page 45_]

If there had been ten or twelve of my neighbors as good at this as I was
we might have organized and drilled together and worked out a class cheer
for the Putnam Division Country Club--three deep long pants, say,
followed by nine sharp short pants or pantlets. But I would have been
elected pants leader without a struggle. My merits were too self-evident
for a contest.

But did I attribute my supremacy in this regard to accumulating and
thickening layers of tissue in the general vicinity of my midriff? I did
not! No, sir, because I was fat--indubitably, uncontrovertibly and beyond
the peradventure of a doubt, fat--I kept on playing the fat man's game of
mental solitaire. I inwardly insisted, and I think partly believed, that
my lung power was too great for the capacity of my throat opening, hence
pants. I cast a pitying eye at other men, deep of girth and purple of
face, waddling down the platform, and as I scudded on past them I would
say to myself that after all there was a tremendous difference between
being obese and being merely well fleshed out. The real reason of course
was that my legs had remained reasonably firm and trim while the torso was
inflating. For I was one who got fat not all over at once but in favored
localities. And I was even as the husband is whose wife is being gossiped
about--the last person in the neighborhood to hear the news.

As though it were yesterday I remember the day and the place and the
attendant circumstances when and where awakening was forced upon me. Two
of us went to Canada on a hunting trip. The last lap of the journey into
camp called for a fifteen-mile horseback ride through the woods. The
native who was to be our chief guide met us with our mounts at a way
station far up in the interior of Quebec. He knew my friend--had guided
him for two seasons before; but I was a stranger in those parts. Now until
that hour it had never occurred to me that I was anywhere nearly so
bulksome as this friend of mine was. For he indubitably was a person of
vast displacement and augmented gross total tonnage; and in that state of
blindness which denies us the gift to see ourselves as others see us I
never had reckoned myself to be in his class, avoir-dupoisefully
speaking. But as we lined up two abreast alongside the station, with our
camp duffel piled about us, the