scales until
then because I was saving up, as it were, to give myself a nice jolly
surprise party.

So I weighed. And I had picked up nine pounds and a half! That was what I
had gained for all my sufferings and all my exertions--that, along with a
set of snappy but emotional pores and a personal knowledge of how a New
England boiled dinner feels just before it comes on the table.

"This," I said bitterly to myself--"this is sheer foolhardiness! Keep this
up for six weeks more and I'll find myself fallen away to a perfect
three-ton truck. Keep it up for three months and I'll be ready to rent
myself out to the aquarium as a suitable playmate for the leviathan in the
main tank. I shall stop this idiocy before it begins making me seasick
merely to look down at myself as I walk. I may slosh about and billow
somewhat, but I positively decline to heave up and down. I refuse to be
known as the human tidal wave, with women and children being hurriedly
removed to a place of safety at my approach. Right here and now is where I
quit qualifying for the inundation stakes!"

Which accordingly I did. What I did not realize was that the unwonted
exercise gave me such a magnificent appetite that, after a session at the
gymnasium, I ate about three times as much as I usually did at
dinner--and, mark you, I never had been one with the appetite, as the
saying goes, of a bird, to peck at some Hartz Mountain roller's prepared
food and wipe the stray rape seed off my nose on a cuttle-fish bone and
then fly up on the perch and tuck the head under the wing and call it a
meal. I had ever been what might be termed a sincere feeder. So, never
associating the question of diet with the problem of attaining physical
slightness, I swung back again into my old mode of life with the resigned
conviction that since destiny had chosen me to be fat there was nothing
for me to do in the premises excepting to go right on to the end of my
mortal chapter being fat, fatter and perhaps fattest. I'd just make the
best of it.

And I'd use care about crossing a county bridge at any gait faster than a
walk.

Now this continued for years and years, and then here a few months ago
something else happened. And on top of that something else--to wit: The
Great Reduction.

Of the Great Reduction more anon.

CHAPTER VI

_More Anon_

Well, I made up my mind, having tried violent exercise in the gymnasium,
coupled with violent language in the steam room, an