Old Judge Priest by Irvin S. Cobb

A LONG and limber man leaned against a doorjamb of the Blue Jug Saloon and Short Order Restaurant, inhaling the mild dear air of the autumnal day and, with the air of a man who amply is satisfied by the aspect of things, contemplating creation at large as it revealed itself along Franklin Street. In such posture he suggested more than anything else a pair of callipers endowed with reason. For this, our disesteemed fellow citizen of the good old days which are gone, was probably the shortest-waisted man in the known world. In my time I have seen other men who might be deemed to be excessively short waisted, but never one to equal in this unique regard Old King Highpockets. A short span less of torso, and a dime museum would have claimed him, sure.

You would think me a gross exaggerator did I attempt to tell you how high up his legs forked; suffice it to say that, as to his suspenders, they crossed the spine just below his back collar button. Wherefore, although born a Magee and baptised an Elmer, it was inevitable in this community that from the days of his youth onward he should have been called what they did call him. To his six feet five and a half inches of lank structural design he owed the more descriptive part of his customary title. The rest of it -- the regal-sounding part of it -- had been bestowed upon him in his ripened maturity after he achieved for himself local dominance in an unhallowed but a lucrative calling.