CHAPTER TWO: 
Those Romping Elfin Twenties 25

CHAPTER THREE: 
Regarding Liver-Eating Watkins and Others 31

CHAPTER FOUR: 
I Become the Panting Champion 41

CHAPTER FIVE: 
On Acquiring Some Snappy Pores 55

CHAPTER SIX: 
More Anon 65

CHAPTER SEVEN: 
Office Visits, $10 75

CHAPTER EIGHT: 
The Friendly Sons of the Boiled Spinach 95

CHAPTER NINE: 
The Fallen Egg 111

CHAPTER TEN: 
Wherein Our Hero Falters 121

CHAPTER ELEVEN: 
Three Cheers for Lithesome Grace Regained 145

ILLUSTRATIONS

I weighed myself and in the box score
credited myself with a profound shock Frontispiece

“64 Broad” 19

To observe Mr. Bryan breakfasting is a
sight worth seeing 45

“You are now registering the preliminary
warnings—­” 87

CHAPTER I

Extra!  Extra!  All About The Great Reduction!

The way I look at this thing is this way:  If something happens to you and by writing about it you can make a bit of money and at the same time be a benefactor to the race, then why not?  Does not the philanthropic aspect of the proposition more than balance off the mercenary side?  I hold that it does, or at least that it should, in the estimation of all fair-minded persons.  It is to this class that I particularly address myself.  Unfair-minded persons are advised to take warning and stop right here with the contemporary paragraph.  That which follows in this little volume is not for them.

An even stronger motive impels me.  In hereinafter setting forth at length and in detail the steps taken by me in making myself thin, or, let us say, thinner, I am patterning after the tasteful and benevolent examples of some of the most illustrious ex-fat men of letters in our country.  Take Samuel G. Blythe now.  Mr. Blythe is the present international bant-weight champion.  There was a time, though, when he was what the world is pleased to call over-sized.  In writing on several occasions, and always entertainingly and helpfully, upon the subject of the methods employed by him to reduce himself to his current proportions I hold that he had the right idea about it.