FullReads

So I repeat that fat people are always getting the worst of it, and I say again, of all the ills that flesh is heir to, the worst is the flesh itself. As the poet says–“The world, the flesh and the devil”–and there you have it in a sentence–the flesh in between, catching the devil on one side and the jeers of the world on the other. I don’t care what Dr. Woods Hutchinson or any other thin man says! I contend that history is studded with instances of prominent persons who lost out because they got fat. Take Cleopatra now, the lady to whom Marc Antony said: “I am dying, Egypt, dying,” and then refrained from doing so for about nineteen more stanzas. Cleo or Pat–she was known by both names, I hear–did fairly well as a queen, as a coquette and as a promoter of excursions on the river–until she fleshened up. Then she flivvered. Doctor Johnson was a fat man and he suffered from prickly heat, and from Boswell, and from the fact that he couldn’t eat without spilling most of the gravy on his second mezzanine landing. As a thin and spindly stripling Napoleon altered the map of Europe and stood many nations on their heads. It was after he had grown fat and pursy that he landed on St. Helena and spent his last days on a barren rock, with his arms folded, posing for steel engravings. Nero was fat, and he had a lot of hard luck in keeping his relatives–they were almost constantly dying on him and he finally had to stab himself with one of those painful-looking old Roman two-handed swords, lest something really serious befall him. Falstaff was fat, and he lost the favor of kings in the last act. Coming down to our own day and turning to a point no farther away than the White House at Washington–but have we not enough examples without becoming personal? Yes, I know Julius Caesar said: “Let me have men about me that are fat.” But you bet it wasn’t in the heated period when J. Caesar said that!

TEETH

One of the most pleasant features about being born, as I conceive it, is that we are born without teeth. I believe there have been a few exceptions to this rule–Richard the Third, according to the accounts, came into the world equipped with all his teeth and a perfectly miserable disposition; and once in a while, especially during Roosevelt years, when the Colonel’s picture is hanging on the walls of so many American homes, we read in the paper that a baby has just been born somewhere with a full set, and even, as in the case of the infant son of a former member of the Rough Riders, with nose glasses and a close-cropped mustache. This, however, may have been a pardonable exaggeration of the real facts. As I recall now, it was reported in a dispatch to the New York Tribune from Lover’s Leap, Iowa, during the presidential campaign eight years ago.

In the main, though, we are born without teeth. We are born without a number of things–clothes for example–although Anthony Comstock is said to be pushing a law requiring all children to be born with overalls on; but teeth is the subject which we are now discussing. This absence of teeth tends to give the very young of our species the appearance in the face of an old fashioned buckskin purse with the draw string broken, but be that as it may, we are generally fairly well content with life until the teeth begin to come.

First there are the milk teeth. Right there our troubles start. To use the term commonly in use, we cut them, although as a matter of fact, they cut us–cut them with the aid of some such mussy thing as a toothing ring or the horny part of the nurse’s thumb, or the reverse side of a spoon–cut them at the cost of infinite suffering, not only for ourselves but for everybody else in the vicinity. And about the time we get the last one in we begin to lose the first one out. They go one at a time, by falling out, or by being yanked out, or by coming out of their own accord when we eat molasses taffy. They were merely what you might call our Entered Apprentice teeth. We go in now for the full thirty-two degrees–one degree for each tooth and thirty-two teeth to a set. By arduous and painful processes, stretching over a period of years, we get our regular teeth–the others were only volunteers–concluding with the wisdom teeth, as so called, but it is a misnomer, because there never is room for them and they have to stand up in the back row and they usually arrive with holes in them, and if we really possessed any wisdom we would figure out some way of abolishing them altogether. They come late and crowd their way in and push the other teeth out of line and so we go about for months with the top of our mouths filled with braces and wires and things, so that when we breathe hard we sob and croon inside of ourselves like an Aeolean harp.