The Makololo women make themselves plump and, to their dusky admirers, pretty, by drinking enormous quantities of a peculiar decoction called "boyaloa;"* the Moorish women of the Western Sahara use a large quantity of milk and butter for the same purpose;* and the well known fondness of the American negress for anointing her body with cocoanut-oil and bear's grease, while a relic of her earlier African barbarism, had its origin probably in a similar idea.

In almost all Oriental countries the "stout lady" is in demand. In fact there are portions of our own where the supply sometimes runs short; but in Turkey and China, where the highest social and matrimonial ambitions are not realized so much through the spirtiuelle type of feminine loveliness as by the number of fingers of fat over the ribs, the ladies are shut up and stall-fed, like Strasbourg geese, before their prudent parents think of putting them upon the market. Indeed the pashas and mandarins, who are the chief patrons of this flourishing domestic industry, buying their wives in carload lots, and always on trial, are not as a rule highly spiriiueUe themselves, running to stomach rather than soul, and paying far greater heed to quantity than to quality. With them, no lady is prized until, instead of one abnormally active chin, she have at least three of the indolent type, and her waist and bust-lines are lost in paraboloid curves of lovely sphericity. They not only like a good thing but plenty of it.

I am proud of our American large ladies. The country wouldn't be worth loving without them; but I confess that when one came puffing up to me on the street the other day, big enough to make a fine travelling advertisement for a new breakfast food, and asked me to "inhale that car" for her, intimating that it was some new kind of smelling salts, I inwardly wished she had been smaller and less conspicuous.