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_One Third Off_
_By Irvin S. Cobb_
_Fiction_
FROM PLACE TO PLACE
THOSE TIMES AND THESE
LOCAL COLOR
OLD JUDGE PRIEST
BACK HOME
THE ESCAPE OF MR. TRIMM
_Wit and Humor_
ONE THIRD OFF
A PLEA FOR OLD CAP COLLIER
THE ABANDONED FARMERS
THE LIFE OF THE PARTY
EATING IN TWO OR THREE LANGUAGES
"OH WELL, YOU KNOW HOW WOMEN ARE!"
FIBBLE D.D.
"SPEAKING OF OPERATIONS--"
EUROPE REVISED
ROUGHING IT DE LUXE
COBB'S BILL OF FARE
COBB'S ANATOMY
_Miscellany_
THE THUNDERS OF SILENCE
THE GLORY OF THE COMING
PATHS OF GLORY
"SPEAKING OF PRUSSIANS--"
* * * * *
_New York_
_George H. Doran Company_
* * * * *
[Illustration: I WEIGHED MYSELF AND IN THE BOX SCORE CREDITED MYSELF WITH
A PROFOUND SHOCK. _Frontispiece_]
_One Third Off_
_By_
_Irvin S. Cobb_
_Author of_
_"Old Judge Priest," "Speaking_
_of Operations--" Etc._
_Illustrated by Tony Sarg_
_New York_
_George H. Doran Company_
_Copyright, 1921,_
_By George H. Doran Company_
_Copyright, 1921,_
_By The Curtis Publishing Company_
_Printed in the United States of America_
_One Third Off_
TO
HARRY M. STEVENS, ESQUIRE
WHO IN TIMES GONE BY HELPED ME
PUT THAT ONE THIRD ON
_CONTENTS_
CHAPTER ONE: PAGE
_Extra! Extra! All About the Great Reduction_ 15
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.
Getting fat is a fault; except when caused by the disease known as
obesity, it is a bad habit. Getting thin and at the same time retaining
one's health is a virtue. Never does the reductionist feel quite so
virtuous as when for the first time, perhaps in decades, he can stand
straight up and look straight down and behold the tips of his toes. His
virtue is all the more pleasant to him because it recalls a reformation on
his part and because it has called for self-denial. I started to say that
it had called for mortification of the flesh, but I shan't. Despite the
contrary opinions of the early fathers of the church, I hold that the
mortification of the flesh is really based upon the flesh itself, where
there is too much of it for beauty and grace, not merely upon the process
employed in getting rid of it.
Ask any fat man--or better still, any formerly fat man--if I am not
correct. But do not ask a fat woman unless, as in the case of possible
fire at a theater, you already have looked about you and chosen the
nearest exit. Taken as a sex, women are more likely to be touchy upon this
detail where it applies to themselves than men are.
I have a notion that probably the late Lucrezia Borgia did not start
feeding her house guests on those deep-dish poison pies with which her
name historically is associated until after she grew sensitive about the
way folks dropping in at the Borgia home for a visit were sizing up her
proportions on the bias, so to speak. And I attribute the development of
the less pleasant side of Cleopatra's disposition--keeping asps around the
house and stabbing the bearers of unpleasant tidings with daggers and
feeding people to the crocodiles and all that sort of thing--to the period
when she found her anklets binding uncomfortably and along toward half
past ten o'clock of an evening was seized by a well-nigh uncontrollable
longing to excuse herself from the company and run upstairs and take off
her jeweled stomacher and things and slip into something loose.
[Illustration: "64 BROAD."]
But upon this subject men are less inclined to be fussy, and by the same
token more inclined, on having accomplished a cure, to take a justifiable
pride in it and to brag publicly about it. As I stated a moment ago, I
claim Mr. Blythe viewed the matter in a proper and commendable light when
he took pen in hand to describe more or less at length his reduction
processes. So, too, did that other notable of the literary world, Mr.
Vance Thompson. Mr. Thompson would be the last one to deny that once upon
a time he undeniably was large. The first time I ever saw him--it was in
Paris some years ago, and he was walking away from me and had his back to
me and was wearing a box coat--I thought for a moment they were taking a
tractor across town. All that, however, belongs to the past. Just so soon
as Mr. Thompson had worked out a system of dieting and by personal
application had proved its success he wrote the volume Eat and Grow Thin,
embodying therein his experiences, his course of treatment and his advice
to former fellow sufferers. So you see in saying now what I mean to say I
do but follow in the mouth-prints of the famous.
Besides, when I got fat I capitalized my fatness in the printed word. I
told how it felt to be fat.
I described how natural it was for a fat man to feel like the Grand Cañon
before dinner and like the Royal Gorge afterwards.
I told how, if he wedged himself into a telephone booth and said, "64
Broad," persons overhearing him were not sure whether he was asking
Central for a number or telling a tailor what his waist measurements were.
I told how deeply it distressed him as he walked along, larding the earth
as he passed, to hear bystanders making ribald comments about the
inadvisability of trying to move bank vaults through the streets in the
daytime. And now that, after fifteen years of fatness, I am getting thin
again--glory be!--wherein, I ask, is the impropriety in furnishing the
particulars for publication; the more especially since my own tale, I
fondly trust, may make helpful telling for some of my fellow creatures?
When you can offer a boon to humanity and at the same time be paid for it
the dual advantage is not to be decried.