coal fire, and critically surveying his own person--was quite the
opposite of Fayette Overtop. Maltboy was fat and calm. Portraits were in
existence showing Maltboy as a young lad in a jacket and turn-down
collar, having a slim, graceful figure, a delicate face, and a sad but
interesting promise of early decay upon him. Other portraits, of the
same original, taken at later periods of the photographic art,
represented a gradual squaring out of the shoulders, a progressive
puffiness in the cheeks, lips, and hands, incipient folds in the chin,
and a prevalent swollen appearance over all of Matthew Maltboy that the
artist permitted the sun to copy.

Portraits of Maltboy for a series of years would have proved a valuable
contribution to human knowledge, as showing the steady and remarkable
changes through which a man who is doomed to be fat passes onward to his
destiny. But Maltboy stopped sitting for portraits when he reached the
age of twenty, deciding, as many another public character has done, to
transmit only the earlier and more ethereal representations of himself
to posterity.

By some compensating law of Nature, there were given to Maltboy a light
and cheerful heart, a tendency to laugh on the smallest provocation, and
a nice susceptibility to the beautiful. Not the beautiful in rivers,
forests, skies, and other inanimate things, but the beautiful in woman.
And as Overtop was gifted to discover charms in material objects which
were plain in other eyes, so Maltboy possessed the wonderful faculty of
seeing beauty in female faces, where other people saw, perhaps, only a
bad nose, dull eyes, and a pinched-up mouth. This mental endowment might
have been a priceless gift to a portrait painter, who was desirous of
gratifying his sitters; but it was for Matthew Maltboy a fatal
possession. It had led him to love too many women too much at first