utterly futile.

Besides, what sort of a way was that to greet the dewy morn?

So as an alternative I decided to enroll for membership at a gymnasium
where I could have company at my exercising and make a sport of what
otherwise would be in the nature of a punishment. This I did. With a group
of fellow inmates for my team mates, I tossed the medicine ball about. My
score at this was perfect; that is to say, sometimes when it came my turn
to catch I missed the ball, but the ball never once missed me. Always it
landed on some tender portion of my anatomy, so that my average, written
in black-and-blue spots, remained an even 1000.

Daily I cantered around and around and around a running track until my
breathing was such probably as to cause people passing the building to
think that the West Side Y.M.C.A. was harboring a pet porpoise inside.
Once, doing this, I caught a glimpse of my own form in a looking-glass
which for some reason was affixed to one of the pillars flanking the oval.
A looking-glass properly did not belong there; distinctly it was out of
place and could serve no worthy purpose. Very few of the sights presented
in a gym which largely is patronized by city-bred fat men are deserving to
be mirrored in a glass. They are not such visions as one would care to
store in fond memory's album. Be that as it may, here was this mirror, and
swinging down the course suddenly I beheld myself in it. Clad in a
chastely simple one-piece garment, with my face all a blistered crimson
and my fingers interlaced together about where the third button of the
waistcoat, counting from the bottom up, would have been had I been
wearing any waistcoat, I reminded myself of a badly scorched citizen
escaping in a scantily dressed condition from a burning homestead bringing
with him the chief family treasure clasped in his arms. He had saved the