He believes that all fat women are sentimental and says that the publisher who will edit a magazine for this clientèle will make a fortune. Inasmuch as magazine fiction heroines are at present always slim, elf-like creatures, he contends that the sentimental fat girl never gets a fair chance to enjoy herself, and that, accordingly, a magazine with no heroine weighing less than one hundred and ninety pounds would in one year put Cyrus K. Curtis in the pauper class. Like Nathan, he believes that the theory that it is difficult to make money is poppycock. If one is willing to give the public what it wants, anyone—argue these two—can get rich very quickly. To prove their contention, they outlined plans for several cheap magazines three years ago, which, upon being put into circulation, proved immediate and overwhelming successes. Mencken and Nathan, at the end of six months, sold their joint interest for $100,000. They argue that the thing is as simple as rolling off a log, and that any person who is interested in this sort of thing may become a Street-and-Smith or Munsey overnight. At the age of nineteen, he invented a slot machine for the vending of patent medicines on excursion boats. He has read “Huckleberry Finn” twenty-seven times. He reads the book once a year, regularly. He has never seen Mrs. Castle, Mary Garden, Ann Pennington, Maurice and Walton, Mary Pickford, or Secretary Lansing. He has shaken hands with Billy Sunday. Wherever he goes he carries a Corona typewriter. He paid $50 cash for it, but nevertheless he has given the manufacturers an eloquent testimonial. He writes on cheap newspaper copy-paper. He is fond of candy. He is an ardent defender of organized charity, arguing that it helps progress by making charity difficult and obnoxious. He is often mistaken for a misogynist. He is actually a strict monogamist. He believes that all men are naturally monogamists, and that polygamy is due to vanity. He began to edit the plays of Ibsen in 1910, but abandoned the enterprise after he had issued “A Doll’s House” and “Little Eyolf.” He is a bitter opponent of Christian Science, and has written all sorts of things, from epigrams to long articles, against it. The La Mencken cigar, once popular throughout the South, was not named after him, but after his father. He is a good sailor, and has been seasick but once—on a 1000-ton British tramp in a West Indian hurricane. In blood he is chiefly Saxon, Danish, Bavarian, and Irish—no Anglo-Saxon, no Prussian, no Latin. The portraits of his Saxon forefathers show strong Slavic traces. He is the present head of the family. A Mencken, in the seventeenth century, founded the first scientific review in Europe. Another was privy councilor to Frederick the Great. Another was rector of the University of Leipzig. Yet another was chief justice of the supreme court there. A Mlle. Mencken was the mother of Bismarck.