In the summer of 1877 the writer met a gentleman of middle age, whom he had known for years, and who has been long connected with one of the United States departments in New York city. A very steady, hard-working officer, his occupation was a sedentary one. Remembering him as a man, till recently, of immense bulk, and being struck with his evident and great shrinkage, we inquired if he had been ill. He replied that he had not been ill, that for years he had not enjoyed better health. Questioning him as to his altered appearance, he said that, on the eighteenth day of January, 1877, he weighed three hundred and five pounds; that, having become so unwieldy, his flesh was a source of great hinderance and annoyance to him. Then he had determined, if possible, to get rid of some of it. Having to be at work all day, he could only effect his purpose in the evenings, or not at all. So, making no especial change in his diet, he took to walking, and soon began to average from three to five miles an evening, and at the best pace he could make. In the cold months he says that he often perspired so that small icicles would form on the ends of his hair. Asking if it did not come a little stiff sometimes, on stormy nights or when he was very tired, and whether he did not omit his exercise at such times, he said no, but, on the contrary, added two miles, which shows the timber the man was made of. On the eighteenth of June of the same year, just five months from the start, he weighed but two hundred and fifteen pounds, _having actually taken off ninety pounds_, and had so altered that his former clothes would not fit him at all. Since that time we have again seen him, and he says he is now down to two hundred, and that he has taken to horseback-riding, as he is fond of that. He looks to-day a large, strong, hearty man of about five feet ten, of rather phlegmatic temperament, but no one would ever think of him as a fat man. Now here is a man well known to hundreds of the lawyers of the New York Bar, a living example of what a little energy and determination will accomplish for a person who sets about his task as if he meant to perform it. During the war, M----, a member of the Boston Police force, known to the writer, was said to weigh three hundred and fifteen pounds, and was certainly an enormously large man. He went South, served for some time as stoker on a gunboat, and an intimate friend of his informed us that he had reduced his weight to one hundred and eighty-four. A girl of fifteen or sixteen, and inclined to be fleshy, found that, by a good deal of horseback-riding daily, she lost twenty-five pounds in one year--so a physician familiar with her case informed us.