authorities recommend health exercises, but health exercises are
almost invariably undignified in effect and wearing besides. Who
wants to greet the dewy morn by lying flat on his back and lifting
his feet fifty times? What kind of a way is that to greet the dewy
morn anyhow? And bending over with the knees stiff and touching
the tips of the toes with the tips of the fingers--that's no
employment for a grown man with a family to support and a position
to maintain in society. Besides which it cannot be done. I make
the statement unequivocally and without fear of successful
contradiction that it cannot be done. And if it could be done--
which as I say it can't--there would be no real pleasure in
touching a set of toes that one has known of only by common rumor
for years. Those toes are the same as strangers to you--you knew
they were in the neighborhood, of course, but you haven't been
intimate with them.

Maybe you try dieting, which is contrary to nature. Nature intended
that a fat man should eat heartily, else why should she endow him
with the capacity and the accommodations. Starving in the midst
of plenty is not for him who has plenty of midst. Nature meant
that a fat man should have an appetite and that he should gratify
it at regular intervals--meant that he should feel like the Grand
Canyon before dinner and like the Royal Gorge afterward. Anyhow,
dieting for a fat man consists in not eating anything that's fit
to eat. The specialist merely tells him to eat what a horse would
eat and has the nerve to charge him for what he could have found
out for himself at any livery stable. Of course he might bant in
the same way that a woman bants. You know how a woman bants. She
begins the day very resolutely, and if you are her husband you want
to avoid irritating her or upsetting her, because hell hath no fury