What the Ossified Man did--and it is greatly to his credit--was to do what any other man of his grade would do. Neither he nor the Fat Woman were highly educated but each had been through a school and each had read and could understand things and each had intelligence and no little sentiment. As remarked, the Ossified Man made his advances as would any other man of his degree. The two came to understand each other in a way and the Fat Woman began to feel somewhere, far away in her system, something she had never felt before. In truth she was beginning to fall in love with the Ossified Man. Not being a fool, the Ossified Man knew it. He realized the fact that he had found another being of the other sex, of good sense, though out of the common in appearance, as sentimental as he, the great heart once fairly stirred. Affairs drifted. He knew that he was going to propose to her and she knew that he was going to ask her to be his wife. That reflection, somehow, startled her throughout all her vast being, though a dim sub-consciousness told her that she liked him much. As for him, he resolved to stake the future upon a single poem he sent to her, confident that she would accept it gravely. And these are the few lines she received: "All flesh is grass, and grass must turn to clay; All bones must turn to dust, and we are they! Since thus we turn, my own, my Colleen Bawn, Why not unite before our breath is gone? It is the judgment ever of the sage That happiness is in the average; What better equipoise than you and I, What more assured? O, sweetheart, let us try!" The Fat Woman was impressed but, more than that, and better in ten thousand ways, she was delighted that the man she realized she loved had finally dared to express himself, though in this odd, sentimental way. She thought much and then--there is shade of correction added--she wrote this letter: "Dear Jim:--I understand your poem. I won't fool a bit. I care for you, Jim, as you care for me. But we will be a joke if we get married now. Can't you see that, Jim? Can't we get more like each other before we get married? We have both saved quite a lot of money. Oh, Jim, if you'll try to get thicker, I'll try to get thinner. "Lovingly, "SARAH." The Ossified Man read that letter and went out and walked up and down the streets for hours. He was the happiest and most perplexed man in all the big city. His heart at least wasn't ossified. He remembered a professor who had studied him and whom he had heard say to those about that there was no occasion for the continued ossification in such a subject, provided the stomach was all right. "I'll go to that old professor," he said, "and I'll put the case to his giblets in a way to make him salty round the eyes. And I'll write all about it to my little girl, God bless 'er!"