attendant circumstances when and where awakening was forced upon me. Two
of us went to Canada on a hunting trip. The last lap of the journey into
camp called for a fifteen-mile horseback ride through the woods. The
native who was to be our chief guide met us with our mounts at a way
station far up in the interior of Quebec. He knew my friend--had guided
him for two seasons before; but I was a stranger in those parts. Now until
that hour it had never occurred to me that I was anywhere nearly so
bulksome as this friend of mine was. For he indubitably was a person of
vast displacement and augmented gross total tonnage; and in that state of
blindness which denies us the gift to see ourselves as others see us I
never had reckoned myself to be in his class, avoir-dupoisefully
speaking. But as we lined up two abreast alongside the station, with our
camp duffel piled about us, the keen-eyed guide, standing slightly to one
side, considered our abdominal profiles, and the look he cast at my
companion said as plainly as words, "Well, I see you've brought a spare
set along with you in case of a puncture."

But he did not come right out and say a thing so utterly tactless. What he
did say, in a worried tone, was that he was sorry now he had not fetched
along a much more powerful horse for me to ride on. He had a good big
chunky work animal, not fast but very strong in the back, he said, which
would have answered my purposes first rate.

I experienced another disillusioning jolt. Could it be that this practiced
woodsman's eye actually appraised me as being as heavy as my mate, or even
heavier? Surely he must be wrong in his judgments. The point was that I
woefully was wrong in mine. How true it is that we who would pluck the
mote from behind a fellow being's waistcoat so rarely take note of the
beam which we have swallowed crosswise!