should find him addressing his words to my strawberry mark.  I should feel that he was deliberately and offensively dwelling on my disfigurement, saying to himself how glad he was he hadn’t a strawberry mark and what a miserable chap I must be with such an article.  He would not be doing anything of the sort, of course.  He would probably be doing his best to keep his eyes off the strawberry mark.  But I shouldn’t think so, for I should be in that unhealthy condition of mind in which the whole world would seem to revolve around my strawberry mark.

And so with the small man.  He lives in perpetual consciousness that the world is talking over his head, not because there is less sense in his head than in other heads, but simply because his legs are shorter than the popular size of legs.  He is either overlooked altogether, or he is looked down upon, and in either case he is miserable.  Occasionally his shortage lays him open to public ridicule.  A barrister whom I knew—­a man with a large head, a fair-sized body, and legs not worth mentioning—­once rose to address a judge before whom he had not hitherto appeared.  He had hardly opened his mouth when the judge remarked severely:  “It is usual for counsel to stand in addressing the Court.”  “My lord,” said the barrister, “I am standing.”

Now can you imagine an agony more bitter than that to a sensitive man?  I daresay he lost his case, for he must certainly have lost his head.  You cannot cross-examine a witness effectively when you are thinking all the time about your miserable legs.  And even if he won his case it probably gave him no comfort, for he would feel that the jury had given their verdict out of pity for the “little ’un.”  It is this self-consciousness that is the cause of that assertiveness and vanity that are often characteristic of the little man.  He is probably not more assertive or more vain than the general run of us, but we can keep those defects dark, so to speak.  He, on the other hand, has to go through life on tip-toe, carrying his head as high as his neck will lift it, and saying, as it were:  “Hi! you long-legged fellows, don’t forget me!” And this very reasonable anxiety to have “a place in the sun” gives him the appearance of being aggressive and vain.  He is only trying to get level with the long-legged people, just as the short-sighted man tries to get level with the long-sighted man by wearing spectacles.

The discomfort of the very tall man is less humiliating than that of the small man, but it is also very real.  He is just as much removed from contact with the normal world, and he has the added disadvantage of being horribly conspicuous.  He can never forget himself, for all heads look up at him as he passes.  He doesn’t fit any doorway; he can’t buy ready-made clothes; if he sleeps in a strange bed he has to leave his feet outside; and in the railway carriage or a bus he has to tie his legs into uncomfortable knots to keep them out of the way.  In short, he finds himself a nuisance in a world made for people of five-feet-nine-and-a-half.  But he has one advantage over the small man.  He does not have to ask for notice.  The result is that while the little man often seems vain and pushful, the giant usually is very tame, and modest, and unobtrusive.  The little man wants to be seen:  the giant wants not to be seen.