interests me is the contempt it revealed for the man of small stature.
There's no doubt that a little man starts with a grievance, with an
aggravating sense of an inferiority that has nothing to do with his real
merits. I know the feeling. For myself, I am just the right height--no
more, no less. I am five-feet-nine-and-a-half, and I wouldn't be a shade
different either way. I dare say that is the general experience. Every one
feels that his own is really the ideal standard. It is so in most things.
Aristotle said that a man ought to marry at thirty-eight. I think he said
it because he himself married at thirty-eight. Now, I married at
twenty-three, and my opinion is that the right age at which to get
married--if you are of the marrying sort--is twenty-three. In short,
whatever we do or whatever we are, we have a deep-rooted conviction that we
are "it." And it is well that it should be so. Without this innocent
self-satisfaction there would be a lot more misery in the world.

But though I am the perfect height of five-feet-nine-and-a-half, I always
feel depressed and out-classed in the presence of a man, say of
six-feet-two. He may be an ass, but still I have to look up to him in a
physical sense, and the mere act of looking up seems to endow him with a
moral advantage. I feel a grievance at the outrageous length of the fellow,
and find I want to make him fully understand that though I am only
five-feet-nine-and-a-half in stature, my intellectual measurement is about
ten feet, and that I am looking down on him much more than he is looking
down on me.

It is this irksome self-consciousness that is the permanent affliction of
the physically small man. Indeed, it is the affliction of any one who has
any physical peculiarity--a hare-lip, for example. Byron raged all his life
against his club-foot, and doubtless that malformation was largely the
cause of his savage contempt for a world that went about on two