the river—until she fleshened up. Then she flivvered. Doctor Johnson was a fat man and he suffered from prickly heat, and from Boswell, and from the fact that he couldn't eat without spilling most of the gravy on his second mezzanine landing. As a thin and spindly stripling Napoleon altered the map of Europe and stood many nations on their heads. It was after he had grown fat and pursy that he landed on St. Helena and spent his last days on a barren rock, with his arms folded, posing for steel engravings. Nero was fat, and he had a lot of hard luck in keeping his relatives—they were almost constantly dying on him and he finally had to stab himself with one of those painful-looking old Roman two-handed swords, lest something really serious befall him. Falstaff was fat, and he lost the favor of kings in the last act. Coming down to our own day and turning to a point no farther away than the White House at Washington—but have we not enough examples without becoming personal? Yes, I know Julius Caesar said: "Let me have men about me that are fat." But you bet it wasn't in the heated period when J. Caesar said that!

   One of the most pleasant features about being born, as I conceive it, is that we are born without teeth. I believe there have been a few exceptions to this rule—Richard the Third, according to the accounts, came into the world equipped with all his teeth and a perfectly miserable disposition; and once in a while, especially during Roosevelt years, when the Colonel's picture is hanging on the walls of so many American homes, we read in the paper that a baby has just been born somewhere with a full set, and even, as in the case of the infant son of a former member of the Rough Riders, with nose glasses and a close-cropped mustache. This, however, may have been a pardonable exaggeration of the real facts. As I recall now, it was reported in a dispatch to the New York Tribune from Lover's Leap, Iowa, during the presidential campaign eight years ago.

   In the main, though, we are born without teeth. We are born without a number of things—clothes for example—although Anthony Comstock is said to be pushing a law requiring all children to be born with overalls on; but teeth is the subject which we are now discussing. This absence of teeth tends to give the very young of our species the appearance in the face of an old fashioned buckskin purse with the draw string broken, but be that as it may, we are generally fairly well content with life until the teeth begin to come.

   First there are the milk teeth. Right there our troubles start. To use the term commonly in use, we cut them, although as a matter of 

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