In a hundred-yard dash I could spot anyone of my juniors a dozen pairs of pants and win out handily.

I was the acknowledged all-weights panting champion of the Putnam division.
[Illustration: TO OBSERVE MR.

BRYAN BREAKFASTING IS A SIGHT WORTH SEEING.
_Page 45_] If there had been ten or twelve of my neighbors as good at this as I was we might have organized and drilled together and worked out a class cheer for the Putnam Division Country Club--three deep long pants, say, followed by nine sharp short pants or pantlets.

But I would have been elected pants leader without a struggle.

My merits were too self-evident for a contest.
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.