1897. 



THE AMERICAN BEE KEEPER. 



349 



The ^^.t Man. *" 



"Does auy one kuow wherefore the 

 heart of a woman clings to a fat man?" 

 asks a waiter in a transatlantic paper 

 in an article on the "Fat Man's Apoth- 

 eosis." "Nature scarcely ofifers any 

 object in the whole range of her at- 

 tractions less heart stirring than he. 

 And yet I have seen wives, sweethearts 

 and sisters — mothers, of course, do not 

 count — who became the most abject 

 slaves, mere odalisques, in the presence 

 of a man whose 200 pounds of adipose 

 tissue was all compressed into a paltry 

 5 feet 5 inches, heels inclusive. And 

 these were not ill favored women in 

 point of culture either; far from it I 

 tan recall quite readily a score or so of 

 each amiable and devoted spouses whc 

 were among the shrewdest, most pol- 

 itic and brainiest women I ever met, 

 and who certainly knew what thej 

 liked and were well fitted by nature M 

 get it 



"It is time to idealize the fat man- 

 ic stop ridiculing him. The artist who 

 caricatures him in the comic weeklies, 

 the paragrapher who pokes sly fun at 

 him in his daily column, the dude who 

 puts up his monocle at him with a 

 smile, are not in it with the fat man 

 where the women are concerned. He 

 may not be their Adonis, nor yet their 

 Apollo. But he is their beau ideal of 

 ponderous and gentle magnanimity. 

 And he never stays single — he cannot. 

 He is not allowed to. If he — from mis- 

 taken public policy — tries to be an old 

 bachelor, some devoted woman will sin- 

 gle hirn out in his oleaginous obscurity 

 and fall to worshiping him in a wistful 

 way that his comfort loving heart can- 

 not withstand. And he marries her. 

 And she straightway puts him up on a 

 pedestal and worships him to the end. 

 And from this height he can afford to 

 look down benignly on Adonis and 

 Apollo, unwedded and uuworshiped. " 



They Pester House Agents. 



"You would not think that we came 

 much in contact with sentimentality in 

 our business, hut I can assure you that 

 we do," Siiid a very well known house 

 agent. 



' 'We are often a great deal bothered 

 by people, most of whom are women, 

 who desire that we will hand over to 

 them the keys of houses, empty just at 



the time, in which they formerly lived 

 and in which some relative, dearly be- 

 loved and much mourned, died. I have 

 known even men who would take a 

 camp stool into a house in this way and 

 sit for hours in the bare and deserted 

 rooms. 



"But the worst nuisance is when peo- 

 ple to whom we have let houses com- 

 plain that some former tenant pesters 

 them with applications, in respect of 

 some particular birthday or otherwise, 

 to sit for awhile in some room that is 

 hallowed by associations. The com- 

 plaints as to such applications are by 

 no means rare in a business of the ex- 

 tent of ours, and the sentimental people 

 often turn very nasty when they are de- 

 pied. 



' 'Last summer a lady committed sui- 

 cide near a very valuable country hos- 

 telry a few miles out of London, and 

 the proprietor of the hostelry gave evi- 

 dence to the effect that the lady often 

 called and asked that she might sit for 

 hoars in silence in the same corner as 

 she and her husband, when the latter 

 was alive, used to occupy every Sunday 

 at tea time. This is just the sort of 

 ultrasentimental person we have pretty 

 commonly to deal with as the applicant 

 for the keys of empty houses. " — Pear- 

 son's Weekly. 



A Humorous Tramp. 



The tramp in real life, bereft of the 

 picturesque atmosphere with which the 

 comic papers surround him, is by no 

 means a hideous creature, but a sub- 

 urban resident claims to have discovered 

 one with a vein of humor which would 

 bring joy to the heart of the comic par- 

 agrapher. "The fellow stopped at my 

 residence," remarked the suburbanite, 

 "and asked for something to eat. My 

 wife chanced to be in the kitchen, and 

 she told him he could have some dinner 

 if he would first saw some wood. This 

 the tramp agreed to do and repaired 

 with the saw to the wood shed. After 

 half an hour had elapsed and the hobo 

 had not come to claim his reward my 

 wife determined to investigate. Going 

 to the shed, she saw that both tramp and 

 saw had disappeared, while the wood 

 pile was undisturbed. A piece of dirty 

 paper piuutd to the door caught her at- 

 tention, and after considerable difficulty 

 she deciphered the message, which read 



