d having found neither
or both had been of the least avail in trimming down my proportions, but
on the contrary had augmented them to the extent of nearly ten pounds,
live weight, that I would let well enough alone. If 'twere my ordained
fate to be fat--why, then so be it; I'd be fatly fatalistic and go on
through life undulating and rippling. If an all-wise Providence meant to
call me to the estate of being the bulkiest writing man using the English
language for a vehicle, then let Hilaire Belloc look to his laurels and
Gilbert K. Chesterton to his unholsterings. There was one consolation:
Thank heavens the championship would remain in America!

The years go marching by in ordered processional. A great war bursts and
for a space endures. In our own land prohibition is nationally enacted and
women's suffrage comes to be, and Irving Berlin, reading the signs of the
times, decides to write The Blue Laws Blues. Fashions of thought change;
other fashions, also. A girl who was born without hips or eyebrows and who
in childhood was regarded as a freak, now finds herself, at the age of
eighteen, exactly in the mode, thus proving that all things come to those
who wait. Czecho-Slovakia is discovered. The American forces spent three
days taking Chateau-Thierry and three years trying to learn to pronounce
it. Ireland undertakes to settle her ancient problem on the basis of
self-extermination. Several rich retail profiteers die, the approval being
hearty and general, and on arriving at heaven experience great difficulty
in passing through the Needle's Eye, or tradesmen's entrance. Somebody
tells Henry Ford about what some high priests did in Jerusalem nearly two
thousand years ago and in the first flush of his startled indignation he
becomes violently anti-Semitic. General Pershing returns from the
battlefields of Europe universally acclaimed a model of military
efficiency and wearing so many medals that alongside him John Philip
Sousa, by contrast, looks absolutely nude. His friends project him into
the political arena and the result is summed in a phrase--"Lafayette, he
ain't there!" Unavailing efforts are made by a rebellious and unreconciled
few of us to find a presidential candidate willing to run on a platform of
but four planks, namely: Wines, ales, liquors and cigars. Harding wins,
Scattering second; Cox also ran: slogan: "He Kept Us Out of McAdoo."
Manhattan Island, from whence the rest of the country derives its panics,
it