The farmer and the manicure artist have discovered the same law of compensation. If a man has a big ear he may have only a little corn. With Jim it was about the same. He chased short-weight fellows all day and when it came night he piled on all the weight he could just to lift himself out of the under-weight rut of the day's work. Fat kept Jim sociable—I don't mean that he was portly, but he was filled out well over the angles of youth. This was desirable, because a lean bachelor can't live with another lean one. I don't know why, except it's Nature's law. He hyenas in the same cage act the same way.
Before Jim started in to take on weight he had been passing through quite a long correspondence with a young woman, and it was so long that I began to give out on poetry and was thinking of laying in more stock in that line to drive the arrow home to a finish. Jim had never done any courting without consulting me. I attended to the correspondence and rather liked my job, because it gave me experience that might be useful. Now that it is all over, of course, I know better—I look the other way.
At the time we were very busy in one of these affairs, I remember, Jim was blue-eared, ragged-nerved and petulant to such a degree that I began to think of shipping him back to the old farm, where pork gravy and fried cakes would certainly restore his nervous system; otherwise I felt he would land in a padded cell. Nothing he ate agreed with him and I felt sure it must be a bad case of unrequited love. He looked sour upon all the world, mistaking me most of the time for the man who ran it. We were both on the point of getting a divorce when he began to take a bottle of ale regularly at dinner. The first week Jim mounted a pound a day and we were both overjoyed to note the improvement in our relations which the ugly co-respondent (did you ever see a co-respondent that wasn't ugly?) had threatened to disturb with the Dakota chills.
The remedy proved it was not a girl who bothered him. For a long time after when Jim felt nervous I would recommend ale. I did not believe it was possible for a woman to disturb him, but I was wrong again.
When Jim had returned two cases of empties we were on thoroughly good terms again. Of course we are glad he tried the ale, but if we had parted then and there we might have saved ourselves a lot of trouble. The small amount the junk man would have paid for our outfit might have been better than what we netted.
CHAPTER II
Any man who knows the first thing about housekeeping, who has gone deep enough into it to bring in wood or light a lamp, ought to know that the upper story of a double boiler is not the thing to fry eggs in. How any man with the faintest glimmering of a suspicion that he can cook an egg should hit upon a tool as unhandy as that, is beyond me. A double boiler is a telescopic arrangement used by first-class cooks for boiled puddings. I understand that they prefer them because the raisins do not get frightened and all huddled up at the bottom trying to escape, like they do if boiled in the New England fashion in a towel. Jim Hosley knew nothing of this, never having read the Gentleman's Home Journal to any extent. One night when I came in—one of the big nights in our history, all right—I found him frying two eggs with this back-handed device. Of course it made no difference to me if he fried them right on the coals and lost everything except the fun of doing it; at the same time I felt called upon to point out the skillet as the appropriate kitchen furniture for the occasion. It was certainly a peculiar notion and hinted to me that another woman had arrived and would soon be everywhere in that flat.
"Jim, you don't know enough about frying eggs," said I, "to deserve them at six for a quarter. You ought to eat canned goods or something you can't damage by fire."