amphibious in hot weather as an open-pored fat man, unless it is a hippopotamus.

   Oh how true is the saying that nobody loves a fat man! When fat comes up on the front porch love jumps out of the third-story window. Love in a cottage? Yes. Love in a rendering plant? No. A fat man's heart is supposed to lie so far inland that the softer emotions cannot reach it at all. Yet the fattest are the truest, if you did but know it, and also they are the tenderest and a man with a double chin rarely leads a double life. For one thing, it requires too much moving round.

   A fat man cannot wear the clothes he would like to wear. As a race fat men are fond of bright and cheerful colors; but no fat man can indulge his innocent desires in this direction without grieving his family and friends and exciting the derisive laughter of the unthinking. If he puts on a fancy-flowered vest, they'll say he looks like a Hanging Garden of Babylon. And yet he has a figure just made for showing off a fancy-flowered vest to best effect. He may favor something in light checks for his spring suit; but if he ventures abroad in a checked suit, ribald strangers will look at him meaningly and remark to one another that the center of population appears to be shifting again. It has been my observation that fat men are instinctively drawn to short tan overcoats for the early fall. But a fat man in a short tan overcoat, strolling up the avenue of a sunny afternoon, will be constantly overhearing persons behind him wondering why they didn't wait until night to move the bank vault. That irks him sore; but if he turns round to reproach them he is liable to shove an old lady or a poor blind man off the sidewalk, and then, like as not, some gamin will sing out: "Hully gee, Chimmy, wot's become of the rest of the parade? 'Ere's the bass drum goin' home all by itself."

   I've known of just such remarks being made and I assure you they cut a sensitive soul to the core. Not for the fat man are the snappy clothes for varsity men and the patterns called by the tailors confined because that is what they should be but aren't. Not for him the silken shirt with the broad stripes. Shirts with stripes that were meant to run vertically but are caused to run horizontally, by reasons over which the wearer has no control, remind others of the awning over an Italian grocery. So the fat man must stick to sober navy blues and depressing blacks and melancholy grays. He is advised that he should wear his evening clothes whenever possible, because black and white lines are more becoming to him. But even in evening clothes, that wide expanse of glazed shirt and those 

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