Jumping into the cool water of the pool was supposed to reseal the pores which the treatment in the hot room had caused to open.  In the best gymnasium circles it is held to be a fine thing to have these educated pores, but I am sure it can be overdone, and personally I cannot say that I particularly enjoyed it.  I kept it up largely for their sake.  They became highly trained, but developed temperament.  They were apt to get the signals mixed and open unexpectedly on the street, resulting in bad colds for me.

For six weeks, on every week day from three to five P.M.  I maintained this schedule religiously—­at least I used a good many religious words while so engaged—­and then I went on the scales to find out what progress I had made toward attaining the desired result.  I had kept off the scales until then because I was saving up, as it were, to give myself a nice jolly surprise party.

So I weighed.  And I had picked up nine pounds and a half!  That was what I had gained for all my sufferings and all my exertions—­that, along with a set of snappy but emotional pores and a personal knowledge of how a New England boiled dinner feels just before it comes on the table.

“This,” I said bitterly to myself—­“this is sheer foolhardiness!  Keep this up for six weeks more and I’ll find myself fallen away to a perfect three-ton truck.  Keep it up for three months and I’ll be ready to rent myself out to the aquarium as a suitable playmate for the leviathan in the main tank.  I shall stop this idiocy before it begins making me seasick merely to look down at myself as I walk.  I may slosh about and billow somewhat, but I positively decline to heave up and down.  I refuse to be known as the human tidal wave, with women and children being hurriedly removed to a place of safety at my approach.  Right here and now is where I quit qualifying for the inundation stakes!”

Which accordingly I did.  What I did not realize was that the unwonted exercise gave me such a magnificent appetite that, after a session at the gymnasium, I ate about three times as much as I usually did at dinner—­and, mark you, I never had been one with the appetite, as the saying goes, of a bird, to peck at some Hartz Mountain roller’s prepared food and wipe the stray rape seed off my nose on a cuttle-fish bone and then fly up on the perch and tuck the head under the wing and call it a meal.  I had ever been what might be termed a sincere feeder.  So, never associating the question of diet with the problem of attaining physical slightness, I swung back again into my old mode of life with the resigned conviction that since destiny had chosen me to be fat there was nothing for me to do in the premises excepting to go right on to the end of my mortal chapter being fat, fatter and perhaps fattest.  I’d just make the best of it.

And I’d use care about crossing a county bridge at any gait faster than a walk.

Now this continued for years and years, and then here a few months ago something else happened.  And on top of that something else—­to wit:  The Great Reduction.