Since prohibition came in and a hiccup became a mark of affluence instead of a social error, as formerly, and a loaded flank is a sign of hospitality rather than of menace, things may have changed.  I am speaking, though, of the damper early nineties in Kentucky, when a sudden motion toward the right hip pocket was a threat and not a promise, as at present.  So, what with first one thing and then another, now collecting the news of the community and now avoiding the customary consequences, I did a good deal of running about hither and yon, and kept fit and spry and stripling-thin.

Yet I ate heartily of all things that appealed to my palate, eating at least two kinds of hot bread at every meal—­down South we say it with flours—­and using chewing tobacco for the salad course, as was the custom.  I ate copiously at and between meals and gained not a whit.

CHAPTER III

Regarding Liver-Eating Watkins and Others

It was after I had moved to New York and had taken a desk job that I detected myself in the act, as it were, of plumping out.  Cognizant of the fact, as I was, I nevertheless took no curative or corrective measures in the way of revising my diet.  I was content to make excuses inwardly.  I said to myself that I came of a breed whose members in their mature years were inclined to broaden noticeably.  I said to myself that I was not getting the amount of exercise that once I had; that my occupation was now more sedentary, and therefore it stood to reason that I should take on a little flesh here and there over my frame.  Moreover, I felt good.  If I had felt any better I could have charged admission.  My appetite was perfect, my digestion magnificent, nay, awe-inspiring.

To me it seemed that physically I was just as active and agile as I had been in those ’prentice years of my professional career when the ability to shift quickly from place to place and to think with an ornithological aptitude were conducive to a continuance of unimpaired health among young reporters.  Anyhow—­thus I to myself in the same strain, continuing—­anyhow, I was not actually getting fat.  Nothing so gross as that.  I merely was attaining to a pleasant, a becoming and a dignified fullness of contour as I neared my thirtieth birthday.  So why worry about what was natural and normal among persons of my temperament, and having my hereditary impulses, upon attaining a given age?

I am convinced that men who are getting fat are generally like that.  For every added pound an added excuse, for each multiplying inch at the waistline a new plea in abatement to be set up in the mind.  I see the truth of it now.  When you start getting fat you start getting fatuous.  With the indubitable proof of his infirmity mounting in superimposed folds of tissues before his very gaze, with the rounded evidence presented right there in front of him where he can rest his elbows on it, your average fattish man nevertheless