But did I attribute my supremacy in this regard to accumulating and thickening layers of tissue in the general vicinity of my midriff?  I did not!  No, sir, because I was fat—­indubitably, uncontrovertibly and beyond the peradventure of a doubt, fat—­I kept on playing the fat man’s game of mental solitaire.  I inwardly insisted, and I think partly believed, that my lung power was too great for the capacity of my throat opening, hence pants.  I cast a pitying eye at other men, deep of girth and purple of face, waddling down the platform, and as I scudded on past them I would say to myself that after all there was a tremendous difference between being obese and being merely well fleshed out.  The real reason of course was that my legs had remained reasonably firm and trim while the torso was inflating.  For I was one who got fat not all over at once but in favored localities.  And I was even as the husband is whose wife is being gossiped about—­the last person in the neighborhood to hear the news.

As though it were yesterday I remember the day and the place and the attendant circumstances when and where awakening was forced upon me.  Two of us went to Canada on a hunting trip.  The last lap of the journey into camp called for a fifteen-mile horseback ride through the woods.  The native who was to be our chief guide met us with our mounts at a way station far up in the interior of Quebec.  He knew my friend—­had guided him for two seasons before; but I was a stranger in those parts.  Now until that hour it had never occurred to me that I was anywhere nearly so bulksome as this friend of mine was.  For he indubitably was a person of vast displacement and augmented gross total tonnage; and in that state of blindness which denies us the gift to see ourselves as others see us I never had reckoned myself to be in his class, avoir-dupoisefully speaking.  But as we lined up two abreast alongside the station, with our camp duffel piled about us, the keen-eyed guide, standing slightly to one side, considered our abdominal profiles, and the look he cast at my companion said as plainly as words, “Well, I see you’ve brought a spare set along with you in case of a puncture.”

But he did not come right out and say a thing so utterly tactless.  What he did say, in a worried tone, was that he was sorry now he had not fetched along a much more powerful horse for me to ride on.  He had a good big chunky work animal, not fast but very strong in the back, he said, which would have answered my purposes first rate.

I experienced another disillusioning jolt.  Could it be that this practiced woodsman’s eye actually appraised me as being as heavy as my mate, or even heavier?  Surely he must be wrong in his judgments.  The point was that I woefully was wrong in mine.  How true it is that we who would pluck the mote from behind a fellow being’s waistcoat so rarely take note of the beam which we have swallowed crosswise!