COBB'S ANATOMY

By Irvin S. Cobb

 To G. H. L. 

 Who stood godfather to these contents

Preface

This Space To-Let to Any Reputable Party Desiring a Good Preface

Contents

 I. Tummies II. Teeth III. Hair IV. Hands and feet

TUMMIES

Dr. Woods Hutchinson says that fat people are happier than other people. How does Dr. Woods Hutchinson know? Did he ever have to leave the twotop buttons of his vest unfastened on account of his extra chins? Hasthe pressure from within against the waistband where the watchfob islocated ever been so great in his case that he had partially to undresshimself to find out what time it was? Does he have to take the tailor'sword for it that his trousers need pressing?

He does not. And that sort of a remark is only what might beexpected from any person upward of seven feet tall and weighing aboutninety-eight pounds with his heavy underwear on. I shall freely take Dr. Woods Hutchinson's statements on the joys and ills of the thin. But whenhe undertakes to tell me that fat people are happier than thinpeople, it is only hearsay evidence with him and decline to accept hisstatements unchallenged. He is going outside of his class. He is, as youmight say, no more than an innocent bystander. Whereas I am a qualifiedauthority. 

I will admit that at one stage of my life, I regarded fleshiness as adesirable asset. The incident came about in this way. There was a circusshowing in our town and a number of us proposed to attend it. It wasone of those one-ring, ten-cent circuses that used to go about over thecountry, and it is my present recollection that all of us had funds laidby sufficient to buy tickets; but if we could procure admission in theregular way we felt it would be a sinful waste of money to pay our wayin. 

With this idea in mind we went scouting round back of the main tent to acomparatively secluded spot, and there we found a place where the canvasside-wall lifted clear of the earth for a matter of four or five inches. We held an informal caucus to decide who should should go first. The honor lay between two of us--between the present writer, whowas reasonably skinny, and another boy, named Thompson, who waseven skinnier. He won, as the saying is, on form. It was decided bypractically a unanimous vote, he alone dissenting, that he should crawlunder and see how the land lay inside. If everything was all right hewould make it known by certain signals and we would then follow, one byone. 

Two of us lifted the canvas very gently and this Thompson boy startedto wriggle under. He was about halfway in when--zip!--like a flash hebodily vanished. He was gone, leaving only the marks where his toes hadgouged the soil. Startled, we looked at one another. There was somethingpeculiar about this. Here was a boy who had started into a circus tentin a circumspect, indeed, a highly cautious manner, and then finishedthe trip with undue and sudden precipitancy. It was more thanpeculiar--it bordered upon the uncanny. It was sinister. Without a wordhaving been spoken we decided to go away from there. 

Wearing expressions of intense unconcern and sterling innocence upon ouryoung faces we did go away from there and drifted back in the generaldirection of the main entrance. We arrived just in time to meet ouryoung friend coming out. He came hurriedly, using his hands and hisfeet both, his feet for traveling and his hands for rubbing purposes. Immediately behind him was a large, coarse man using language thatstamped him as a man who had outgrown the spirit of youth and waspreeminently out of touch with the ideals and aims of boyhood. 

At that period it seemed to me and to the Thompson boy, who was moved tospeak feelingly on the subject, and in fact to all of us, that excessiveslimness might have its drawbacks. Since that time several of us havehad occasion to change our minds. With the passage of years we havefleshened up, and now we know better. The last time I saw the Thompsonboy he was known as Excess-Baggage Thompson. His figure in profilesuggested a man carrying a roll-top desk in his arms and his face lookedlike a face that had refused to jell and was about to run down on hisclothes. He spoke longingly of the days of his youth and wondered if theshape of his knees had changed much since the last time he saw them. 

Yes sir, no matter what Doctor Hutchinson says, I contend that the slimman has all the best of it in this world. The fat man is the universalgoat; he is humanity's standing joke. Stomachs are the curse of ourmodern civilization. When a man gets a stomach his troubles begin. Ifyou doubt this ask any fat man--I started to say ask any fat woman, too. Only there aren't any fat women to speak of. There are women who areplump and will admit it; there are even women who are inclined to bestout. But outside of dime museums there are no fat women. But there areplenty of fat men. Ask one of them. Ask any one of them. Ask me. 

This thing of acquiring a tummy steals on one insidiously, like a thiefin the night. You notice that you are plumping out a trifle and for thetime being you feel a sort of small personal satisfaction in it. Yourshirts fit you better. You love the slight strain upon the buttonholes. You admire the pleasant plunking sound suggestive of ripe watermelonswhen you pat yourself. Then a day comes when the persuasive odor ofmothballs fills the autumnal air and everybody at the barber shop ishaving the back of his neck shaved also, thus betokening awakened socialactivities, and when evening is at hand you take the dress-suit, whichfitted you so well, out of the closet where it has been hanging andundertake to back yourself into it. You are pained to learn that it isabout three sizes too small. At first you are inclined to blame thesuit for shrinking, but second thought convinces you that the fault lieselsewhere. It is you that have swollen, not the suit that has shrunk. The buttons that should adorn the front of the coat are now plainlyvisible from the rear. 

You buy another dress-suit and next fall you have out-grown that onetoo. You pant like a lizard when you run to catch a car. You cross yourlegs and have to hold the crossed one on with both hands to keep yourstomach from shoving it off in space. After a while you quit crossingthem and are content with dawdling yourself on your own lap. You arefat! Dog-gone it--you are fat!

You are up against it and it is up against you, which is worse. You aresomething for people to laugh at. You are also expected to laugh. Itis all right for a thin man to be grouchy; people will say the poorcreature has dyspepsia and should be humored along. But a fat man witha grouch is inexcusable in any company--there is so much of him to begrouchy. He constitutes a wave of discontent and a period of generaldepression. He is not expected to be romantic and sentimental either. Itis all right for a giraffe to be sentimental, but not a hippopotamus. Ifyou doubt me consult any set of natural history pictures. The giraffe isshown with his long and sinuous neck entwined in fond embrace about theneck of his mate; but the amphibious, blood-sweating hippo is depictedas spouting and wallowing, morose and misanthropic, in a mud puddleoff by himself. In passing I may say that I regard this comparison asa particularly apt one, because I know of no living creature so trulyamphibious in hot weather as an open-pored fat man, unless it is ahippopotamus. 

Oh how true is the saying that nobody loves a fat man! When fat comes upon the front porch love jumps out of the third-story window. Love ina cottage? Yes. Love in a rendering plant? No. A fat man's heart issupposed to lie so far inland that the softer emotions cannot reach itat all. Yet the fattest are the truest, if you did but know it, andalso they are the tenderest and a man with a double chin rarely leads adouble life. For one thing, it requires too much moving round. 

A fat man cannot wear the clothes he would like to wear. As a race fatmen are fond of bright and cheerful colors; but no fat man can indulgehis innocent desires in this direction without grieving his family andfriends and exciting the derisive laughter of the unthinking. If he putson a fancy-flowered vest, they'll say he looks like a Hanging Gardenof Babylon. And yet he has a figure just made for showing off afancy-flowered vest to best effect. He may favor something in lightchecks for his spring suit; but if he ventures abroad in a checked suit, ribald strangers will look at him meaningly and remark to one anotherthat the center of population appears to be shifting again. It hasbeen my observation that fat men are instinctively drawn to short tanovercoats for the early fall. But a fat man in a short tan overcoat, strolling up the avenue of a sunny afternoon, will be constantlyoverhearing persons behind him wondering why they didn't wait untilnight to move the bank vault. That irks him sore; but if he turns roundto reproach them he is liable to shove an old lady or a poor blindman off the sidewalk, and then, like as not, some gamin will sing out:"Hully gee, Chimmy, wot's become of the rest of the parade? 'Ere's thebass drum goin' home all by itself. "

I've known of just such remarks being made and I assure you they cut asensitive soul to the core. Not for the fat man are the snappy clothesfor varsity men and the patterns called by the tailors confined becausethat is what they should be but aren't. Not for him the silken shirtwith the broad stripes. Shirts with stripes that were meant to runvertically but are caused to run horizontally, by reasons over whichthe wearer has no control, remind others of the awning over an Italiangrocery. So the fat man must stick to sober navy blues and depressingblacks and melancholy grays. He is advised that he should wear hisevening clothes whenever possible, because black and white lines aremore becoming to him. But even in evening clothes, that wide expanse ofglazed shirt and those white enamel studs will put the onlookers in mindof the front end of a dairy lunch or so I have been cruelly told. 

When planning public utilities, who thinks of a fat man? There never wasa hansom cab made that would hold a fat man comfortably unless he leftthe doors open, and that makes him feel undressed. There never was anorchestra seat in a theater that would contain all of him at the sametime--he churns up and sloshes out over the sides. Apartment houses andelevators and hotel towels are all constructed upon the idea that theworld is populated by stock-size people with those double-A-last shapes. 

Take a Pullman car, for instance. One of the saddest sights known isthat of a fat man trying to undress on one of those closet shelvescalled upper berths without getting hopelessly entangled in the hammockor committing suicide by hanging himself with his own suspenders. Andafter that, the next most distressing sight is the same fat man afterhe has undressed and is lying there, spouting like a sperm-whale andoverflowing his reservation like a crock of salt-rising dough in a warmkitchen, and wondering how he can turn over without bulging the side ofthe car and maybe causing a wreck. Ah me, those dark green curtains withthe overcoat buttons on them hide many a distressful spectacle from thetraveling public!

If a fat man undertakes to reduce nobody sympathizes with him. Athin man trying to fatten up so he won't fall all the way through histrousers when he draws 'em on in the morning is an object of sympathyand of admiration, and people come from miles round and give him adviceabout how to do it. But suppose a fat man wants to train down to a pointwhere, when he goes into a telephone booth and says "Ninety-four Broad, "the spectators will know he is trying to get a number and not tellinghis tailor what his waist measure is. 

Is he greeted with sympathetic understanding? He is not. He is greetedwith derision and people stand round and gloat at him. The authoritiesrecommend health exercises, but health exercises are almost invariablyundignified in effect and wearing besides. Who wants to greet the dewymorn by lying flat on his back and lifting his feet fifty times? Whatkind of a way is that to greet the dewy morn anyhow? And bending overwith the knees stiff and touching the tips of the toes with the tipsof the fingers--that's no employment for a grown man with a family tosupport and a position to maintain in society. Besides which itcannot be done. I make the statement unequivocally and without fearof successful contradiction that it cannot be done. And if it couldbe done--which as I say it can't--there would be no real pleasure intouching a set of toes that one has known of only by common rumor foryears. Those toes are the same as strangers to you--you knew they werein the neighborhood, of course, but you haven't been intimate with them. 

Maybe you try dieting, which is contrary to nature. Nature intended thata fat man should eat heartily, else why should she endow him with thecapacity and the accommodations. Starving in the midst of plenty is notfor him who has plenty of midst. Nature meant that a fat man should havean appetite and that he should gratify it at regular intervals--meantthat he should feel like the Grand Canyon before dinner and like theRoyal Gorge afterward. Anyhow, dieting for a fat man consists in noteating anything that's fit to eat. The specialist merely tells him toeat what a horse would eat and has the nerve to charge him for whathe could have found out for himself at any livery stable. Of coursehe might bant in the same way that a woman bants. You know how a womanbants. She begins the day very resolutely, and if you are her husbandyou want to avoid irritating her or upsetting her, because hell hath nofury like a woman banting. For breakfast she takes a swallow of lukewarmwater and half of a soda cracker. For luncheon she takes the otherhalf of the cracker and leaves off the water. For dinner she orderseverything on the menu except the date and the name of the proprietor. She does this in order to give her strength to go on with the treatment. 

No fat man would diet that way; but no matter which way he does diet itdoesn't do him any good. Health exercises only make him muscle-sore andbring on what the Harvard ball team call the Charles W. Horse; whilebanting results in attacks of those kindred complaints--the Mollie K. Grubbs and the Fan J. Todds. 

Walking is sometimes recommended and the example of the camel is pointedout, the camel being a creature that can walk for days and days. But, as has been said by some thinking person, who in thunder wants to be acamel? The subject of horseback riding is also brought up frequently inthis connection. It is one of the commonest delusions among fat menthat horseback riding will bring them down and make them sylphlike andwillowy. I have several fat men among my lists of acquaintances wholabor under this fallacy. None of them was ever a natural-born horsebackrider; none of them ever will be. I like to go out of a bright morningand take a comfortable seat on a park bench--one park bench is plentyroomy enough if nobody else is using it--and sit there and watch theseunhappy persons passing single file along the bridle-path. I sit thereand gloat until by rights I ought to be required to take out a gloater'slicense. 

Mind you, I have no prejudice against horseback riding as such. Horseback riding is all right for mounted policemen and Colonel W. F. Cody and members of the Stickney family and the party who used to playMazeppa in the sterling drama of that name. That is how those personsmake their living. They are suited for it and acclimated to it. It isalso all right for equestrian statues of generals in the Civil War. Butit is not a fit employment for a fat man and especially for a fat manwho insists on trying to ride a hard-trotting horse English style, whichreally isn't riding at all when you come right down to cases, but anoutdoor cure for neurasthenia invented, I take it, by a British subjectwho was nervous himself and hated to stay long in one place. So, as Iwas saying, I sit there on my comfortable park bench and watchthose friends of mine bouncing by, each wearing on his face that setexpression which is seen also on the faces of some men while waltzing, and on the faces of most women when entertaining their relatives bymarriage. I have one friend who is addicted to this form of punishmentin a violent, not to say a malignant form. He uses for his purpose atall and self-willed horse of the Tudor period--a horse with those highdormer effects and a sloping mansard. This horse must have been raised, I think, in the knockabout song-and-dance business. Every time he hearsmusic or thinks he hears it he stops and vamps with his feet. Whenhe does this my friend bends forward and clutches him round the necktightly. I think he is trying to whisper in the horse's ear and beg himin Heaven's name to forbear; but what he looks like is Santa Claus witha clean shave, sitting on the combing of a very steep house with hisfeet hanging over the eaves, peeking down the chimney to see if thechildren are asleep yet. When that horse dies he will still have fingermarks on his throat and the authorities will suspect foul play probably. 

Once I tried it myself. I was induced to scale the heights of a horsethat was built somewhat along the general idea of the Andes Mountains, only more rugged and steeper nearing the crest. From the ground helooked to be not more than sixteen hands high, but as soon as I was upon top of him I immediately discerned that it was not sixteen hands--itwas sixteen miles. What I had taken for the horse's blaze face wasa snow-capped peak. Miss Anna Peck might have felt at home up there, because she has had the experience and is used to that sort of thing, but I am no mountain climber myself. 

Before I could make any move to descend to the lower and less rarefiedaltitudes the horse began executing a few fancy steps, and he startedtraveling sidewise with a kind of a slanting bias movement that wasextremely disconcerting, not to say alarming, instead of proceedingstraight ahead as a regular horse would. I clung there astraddle of hisridge pole, with my fingers twined in his mane, trying to anticipatewhere he would be next, in order to be there to meet him if possible;and I resolved right then that, if Providence in His wisdom so willed itthat I should get down from up there alive, I would never do so again. However, I did not express these longings in words--not at that time. Atthat time there were only two words in the English language which seemedto come to me. One of them was "Whoa" and the other was "Ouch, " andI spoke them alternately with such rapidity that they merged into thecompound word "Whouch, " which is a very expressive word and one that Iwould freely recommend to others who may be situated as I was. 

At that moment, of all the places in the world that I could thinkof--and I could think of a great many because the events of my pastlife were rapidly flashing past me--as is customary, I am told, in othercases of grave peril, such as drowning--I say of all the places in theworld there were just two where I least desired to be--one was up on topof that horse and the other was down under him. But it seemed to be achoice of the two evils, and so I chose the lesser and got under him. Idid this by a simple expedient that occurred to me at the moment. I felloff. I was tramped on considerably, and the earth proved to be harderthan it looked when viewed from an approximate height of sixteen milesup, but I lived and breathed--or at least I breathed after a timehad elapsed--and I was satisfied. And so, having gone through thisexperience myself, I am in position to appreciate what any other manof my general build is going through as I see him bobbing by--the poormartyr, sacrificing himself as a burnt offering, or anyway a blisteredone--on the high altar of a Gothic ruin of a horse. And, besides, Iknow that riding a horse doesn't reduce a fat man. It merely reduces thehorse. 

So it goes--the fat man is always up against it. His figure ishalf-masted in regretful memory of the proportions he had once, andhe is made to mourn. Most sports and many gainful pursuits are closedagainst him. He cannot play lawn tennis, or, at least according to myobservation, he cannot play lawn tennis oftener than once in two weeks. In between games he limps round, stiff as a hat tree and sore as amashed thumb. Time was when he might mingle in the mystic mazes of thewaltz, tripping the light fantastic toe or stubbing it, as the case maybe. But that was in the days of the old-fashioned square dance, whichwas the fat man's friend among dances, and also of the old-fashionedtwo-step, and not in these times when dancing is a cross between awrestling match, a contortion act and a trip on a roller-coaster, and iseither named for an animal, like the Bunny Hug and the Tarantula Glide, or for a town, like the Mobile Mop-Up, and the Far Rockaway Rock and theSouth Bend Bend. His friends would interfere--or the authorities would. He can go in swimming, it is true; but if he turns over and floats, people yell out that somebody has set the life raft adrift; and if hebasks at the water's edge, boats will come in and try to dock alongsidehim; and if he takes a sun bath on the beach and sunburns, there's soeverlasting much of him to be sunburned that he practically amounts to aconflagration. He can't shoot rapids, craps or big game with any degreeof comfort; nor play billiards. He can't get close enough to the tableto make the shots, and he puts all the English on himself and none of iton the cue ball. 

Consider the gainful pursuits. Think how many of them are denied to theman who may have energy and ability but is shut out because there are afew extra terraces on his front lawn. A fat man cannot be a leading manin a play. Nobody desires a fat hero for a novel. A fat man cannot goin for aeroplaning. He cannot be a wire-walker or a successful walkerof any of the other recognized brands--track, cake, sleep or floor. Hedoesn't make a popular waiter. Nobody wants a fat waiter on a hot day. True, you may make him bring your order under covered dishes, buteven so, there is still that suggestion of rain on a tin roof that isdistasteful to so many. 

So I repeat that fat people are always getting the worst of it, and Isay again, of all the ills that flesh is heir to, the worst is the fleshitself. As the poet says--"The world, the flesh and the devil"--andthere you have it in a sentence--the flesh in between, catching thedevil on one side and the jeers of the world on the other. I don't carewhat Dr. Woods Hutchinson or any other thin man says! I contend thathistory is studded with instances of prominent persons who lost outbecause they got fat. Take Cleopatra now, the lady to whom Marc Antonysaid: "I am dying, Egypt, dying, " and then refrained from doing so forabout nineteen more stanzas. Cleo or Pat--she was known by both names, I hear--did fairly well as a queen, as a coquette and as a promoter ofexcursions on the river--until she fleshened up. Then she flivvered. Doctor Johnson was a fat man and he suffered from prickly heat, and fromBoswell, and from the fact that he couldn't eat without spilling mostof the gravy on his second mezzanine landing. As a thin and spindlystripling Napoleon altered the map of Europe and stood many nations ontheir heads. It was after he had grown fat and pursy that he landedon St. Helena and spent his last days on a barren rock, with his armsfolded, posing for steel engravings. Nero was fat, and he had a lot ofhard luck in keeping his relatives--they were almost constantly dying onhim and he finally had to stab himself with one of those painful-lookingold Roman two-handed swords, lest something really serious befall him. Falstaff was fat, and he lost the favor of kings in the last act. Comingdown to our own day and turning to a point no farther away than theWhite House at Washington--but have we not enough examples withoutbecoming personal? Yes, I know Julius Caesar said: "Let me have menabout me that are fat. " But you bet it wasn't in the heated period whenJ. Caesar said that!

TEETH

One of the most pleasant features about being born, as I conceive it, is that we are born without teeth. I believe there have been a fewexceptions to this rule--Richard the Third, according to the accounts, came into the world equipped with all his teeth and a perfectlymiserable disposition; and once in a while, especially during Rooseveltyears, when the Colonel's picture is hanging on the walls of so manyAmerican homes, we read in the paper that a baby has just been bornsomewhere with a full set, and even, as in the case of the infant sonof a former member of the Rough Riders, with nose glasses and aclose-cropped mustache. This, however, may have been a pardonableexaggeration of the real facts. As I recall now, it was reported in adispatch to the New York Tribune from Lover's Leap, Iowa, during thepresidential campaign eight years ago. 

In the main, though, we are born without teeth. We are born without anumber of things--clothes for example--although Anthony Comstock is saidto be pushing a law requiring all children to be born with overalls on;but teeth is the subject which we are now discussing. This absence ofteeth tends to give the very young of our species the appearance in theface of an old fashioned buckskin purse with the draw string broken, butbe that as it may, we are generally fairly well content with life untilthe teeth begin to come. 

First there are the milk teeth. Right there our troubles start. To usethe term commonly in use, we cut them, although as a matter of fact, they cut us--cut them with the aid of some such mussy thing as atoothing ring or the horny part of the nurse's thumb, or the reverseside of a spoon--cut them at the cost of infinite suffering, not onlyfor ourselves but for everybody else in the vicinity. And about the timewe get the last one in we begin to lose the first one out. They go oneat a time, by falling out, or by being yanked out, or by coming out oftheir own accord when we eat molasses taffy. They were merely whatyou might call our Entered Apprentice teeth. We go in now for the fullthirty-two degrees--one degree for each tooth and thirty-two teeth toa set. By arduous and painful processes, stretching over a periodof years, we get our regular teeth--the others were onlyvolunteers--concluding with the wisdom teeth, as so called, but it is amisnomer, because there never is room for them and they have to standup in the back row and they usually arrive with holes in them, and if wereally possessed any wisdom we would figure out some way of abolishingthem altogether. They come late and crowd their way in and push theother teeth out of line and so we go about for months with the top ofour mouths filled with braces and wires and things, so that when webreathe hard we sob and croon inside of ourselves like an Aeolean harp. 

But in any event we get them all and no sooner do we get them than webegin to lose them. They develop cavities and aches and extra roots andwe spend a good part of our lives and most of our substance with thedentist. Nevertheless, in spite of all we can do and all he can do, wekeep on losing them. And after awhile, they are all gone and our facefolds up on us like a crush hat or a concertina and from our brow to ourchin we don't look much more than a third as long as we used to look. We dislike this folded-up appearance naturally--who wouldn't? And we gettired of living on spoon victuals and the memory of past beef-steaks. Sowe go and get some false ones made. They have to be made to order;there appears to be no market for custom made teeth; you never see anyhand-me-down teeth advertised, guaranteed to fit any face and withstanda damp climate. Getting them made to order is a long and unhappy processand I will pass over it briefly. Having got them, we find that they donot fit us or that we do not fit them, which comes to the same thing. The dentist makes them fit by altering us some and the teeth some, andafter some months they quit feeling as though they didn't belong to usbut had been borrowed temporarily from somebody's loan collection ofceramics. 

But just about the time they are becoming acclimated and we are gettingused to them, the interior of our mouth for private reasons best knownto itself changes around materially and we either have to go back andstart all over and go through the whole thing again, or else haply wedie and pass on to the bourne from which no traveller returneth eitherwith his teeth or without them. If Shakespeare had only thought ofit--and he did think of a number of things from time to time--he mighthave divided his Seven Ages of Man much better by making them the SevenAges of Teeth as follows: First age--no tooth; second age--milk teeth;third age--losing 'em; fourth age--getting more teeth; fifthage--losing 'em; sixth age--getting false teeth and finding they aren'tsatisfactory; seventh age--toothless again. 

I knew a man once who was a gunsmith and lost all his teeth at acomparatively early age. He went along that way for years. He had toeschew the tenderloin for the reason that he couldn't chew it, and hehad to cut out hickory nut cake and corn on the ear and such things. Butthere is nothing about the art of gunsmithing which seems to call forteeth, so he got along very well, living in a little house with the wifeof his bosom and a faithful housedog named Ponto. But when he was pastsixty he went and got himself some teeth from the dentist. He did thiswithout saying anything about it at home; he was treasuring it up for asurprise. The corner stone was laid in May and the scaffolding was allup by July and in August the new teeth were dedicated with suitableceremonies. 

They altered his appearance materially. His nose and chin which had beenon terms of intimacy now rubbed each other a last fond good-bye and hisface lost that accordion-pleated look and straightened out and becameabout six or seven inches longer from top to bottom. He now had a sortof determined aspect like the iron jawed lady in a circus, whereasbefore his face had the appearance of being folded over and waddeddown inside of his neck band, so his hat could rest comfortably on hiscollar. He knew he was altered, but he didn't realize how much he wasaltered until he went home that evening and walked proudly in the frontgate. His wife who was timid about strangers, slammed the door right inhis face and faithful Ponto came out from under the porch steps and bithim severely in the calf of the leg. There was only one consolationin it for him--for the first time in a long number of years he was inposition to bite back. 

And that's how it is with teeth--with your teeth let us say--for righthere I'm going to drop the personal pronoun and speak of them as yourteeth from now on. If anybody has to suffer it might as well be you andnot me; I expect to be busy telling about it. As I started to say awhileago, you--remember it's you from this point--you get your regular teethand they start right in giving you trouble. Every little while one ofthem bursts from its cell with a horrible yell and in the lulls betweenpangs you go forth among men with the haunted look in your eye of onewho is listening for the footfalls of a dread apparition, and one halfof your head is puffed out of plumb as though you were engaged in thewhimsical idea of holding an egg plant in the side of your jaw. A kindfriend meets you, and, speaking with that high courage and that loftyspirit of sacrifice which a kind friend always exhibits when it's yourtooth that is kicking up the rumpus and not his, he tells you you oughtto have something done for it right away. You know that as well as hedoes, but you hate to have the subject brought up. It's your toothacheanyhow. It originated with you. You are its proud parent but not soawfully proud at that. Mother and child doing as well as could beexpected, but not expected to do very well. 

But these friends of yours keep on shoving their free advice on you andthe tooth keeps on getting worse and worse until the pain spreads allthrough the First Ward and finally you grab your resolution in bothhands to keep it from leaking out between your fingers and you go to thedentist's. 

This happens so many times that after awhile you lose count and so wouldthe dentist, if he didn't write your name down every time in his littlered book with pleasingly large amounts entered opposite to it. It seemsto you that you are always doing something for your teeth? You have thempulled and pushed and shoved and filled and unfilled and refilled andexcavated and blasted and sculptured and scroll-sawed and a lot of otherthings that you wouldn't think could be done legally without a buildingpermit. As time passes on, the inside of your once well-tilled andcommodious head becomes but little more than a recent site. Your vaultshave been blown and most of your contents abstracted by Amalgam Mikeand Dental Slim, the Demon Yeggmen of the Human Face. You are merely thescattered clews left behind for the authorities to work on; you are thefaint traces of the fiendish crime. You are the point marked X. 

But all along there is generally one tooth that has behaved herself likea lady. Other teeth may have betrayed your confidence but Old Faithfulhas hung on, attending to business, asking only for standing room andkind treatment. The others you may view with alarm, but to this toothyou can point with pride. But have a care--she is deceiving you. 

Some night you go to bed and have a dream. In your dream it seems to youthat a fox terrier is chasing a woodchuck around and around the insideof your head. In that tangled sort of fashion peculiar to dreams yoursympathy seems to go out first to the fox terrier and then to thewoodchuck as they circle about nimbly, leaping from your tonsils to yourlarynx and then up over the rafters in the roof of your mouth and downagain and pattering over the sub-maxillary from side to side. But aboutthen you wake up with a violent start and decide that any sympathyyou may have in stock should be reserved for personal use exclusively, because at this moment the dog trees the woodchuck at the base ofthat cherished tooth of yours and starts to dig him out. He is a verydetermined dog and very active, but he needs a manicure. You are struckby that fact almost immediately. 

Uttering some of those trite and commonplace remarks that are customaryfor use under such circumstances and yet are so futile to expressone's real sentiments, you arise and undertake to pacify the infuriatedcreature with household remedies. You try to lure him away with a wadof medicated cotton stuck on the end of a parlor match. But arnica isevidently an acquired taste with him. He doesn't seem to care for it anymore than you do. You begin to dress, using one hand to put your clotheson with and the other to hold the top of your head on. At this importantjuncture, the dog tears down the last remaining partitions and nails thewoodchuck. The woodchuck is game--say what you will about the habits andcustoms of the woodchuck you have to hand it to him there--he's game asa lion. He fights back desperately. Intense excitement reigns throughoutthe vicinity. While the struggle wages you get your clothes on and waitfor daylight to come, which it does in from eight to ten weeks. Norwayis not the only place where the nights are six months long. 

There is nobody waiting at the dentist's when you get there, it beingearly. You are willing to wait. At a barber shop it may be different butat a dentist's you are always willing to wait, like a gentleman. But thesinewy young man who is sitting in the front parlor reading the HammerThrower's Gazette, welcomes you with a false air of gaiety entirely outof keeping with the circumstances and invites you to step right in. Hetells you that you are next. This is wrong--if you were next you wouldturn and flee like a deer. Not being next, you enter. Right from thestart you seem to take a dislike to this young man. You catch himspitting in his hands and hitching his sleeves up as you are hanging upyour hat. Besides he is too robust for a dentist. With those shouldershe ought to be a boiler maker or a safe mover or something of that sort. You resolve inwardly that next time you go to a dentist you are going toone of a more lady-like bearing and gentler demeanor. It seems abrutal thing that a big strong man should waste his years in a dentalestablishment when the world is clamoring for strong men to do the heavylifting jobs. But before you can say anything, this muscular athlete haslaid violent hands on your palpitating form and wadded it abruptly intothe hideous embraces of a red plush chair, which looks something likethe one they use up at Sing Sing, only it's done more quickly up thereand with less suffering on the part of the condemned. On one side ofyou you behold quite a display of open plumbing and on the other sidea tasty exhibit of small steel tools of assorted sizes. No matter whichway your gaze may stray you'll be seeing something attractive. 

You also take notice of an electric motor about large enough, you wouldsay, to run a trolley car, which is purring nearby in a sinister andforbidding way. They are constantly making these little improvementsin the dental profession. I have heard that fifty years ago a dentisttraveled about over the country from place to place, sometimes pulling atooth and sometimes breaking a colt. He practiced his art with an outfitconsisting of two pairs of iron forceps--one pair being saber-toothedwhile the other pair was merely saw-fretted--and he gave a man the samekind of treatment he gave a horse, only he tied the horse's legs first. But now electricity is in general use and no dentist's establishment iscomplete without a dynamo attachment which makes a crooning sound whenin operation and provides instrumental accompaniment to the song of theofficial canary. 

I know why a barber in a country town is always learning to play on theguitar and I know why a man with an emotional Adam's apple always wearsan open front collar. I know these things, but am debarred from tellingthem by reason of a solemn oath. But I have not yet been able todiscover why every dentist keeps a canary in his office. Nor do I knowwhy it is, just as you settle your neck back on a head rest that's everybit as comfortable as an anvil, and just as a dentist climbs into youas far as the arm pits and begins probing at the bottom of a tooth whichhas roots extending back behind your ears, like an old-fashioned pair ofspectacles, that the canary bird should wipe his nose on a cuttle boneand dash into a melodious outburst of two hundred thousand twitters, all of them being twitters of the same size, shape, and color. For thatmatter, I don't even know what kind of an animal a cuttle is, although Ishould say from the shape of his bone as used by the canary instead ofa pocket handkerchief, that he is circular and flat and stands onedge only with the utmost difficulty. If you will pardon my temporarydigressions into the realm of natural history, we will now return to themain subject, which was your tooth. 

The moment the muscular young man starts up his motor and gives thecanary its music cue and begins pawing over his tool collection to pickout a good sharp one, you recover. All of a sudden you feel fine, andso does the tooth. Neither one of you ever felt better. The fox terriermust have killed the woodchuck and then committed suicide. You areabout to mention this double tragedy and beg the young man's pardon forcausing him any trouble and excuse yourself and go away, but just thenhe quits feeling of his biceps and suddenly seizes you by your featuresand undoes them. If you are where you can catch a glimpse of yourself ina mirror you will immediately note how much the human face divine can bemade to look like an old-fashioned red brick Colonial fire place. 

There are likely to be several things you would like to talk about. Youare full of thoughts seeking utterance. For one thing you want to tellhim you don't think the brand of soap he uses on his hands is going toagree with you at all. You probably don't care personally for the wayyour barber's thumb tastes either, but a barber's thumb is PeachesMelba alongside of a dentist's. Before you can say anything though hediscovers a cavity or orifice of some sort in the base of your tooth. It seems to give him pleasure. Filled with intense gratification by thisdiscovery and fired moreover by the impetuous ardor of the chase, hegrabs up a crochet needle with a red hot stinger on the end of it andjabs it down your tooth to a point about opposite where your suspendersfork in the back. 

You have words with him then, or at least you start to have words withhim, but he puts his knee in your chest and tells you that it reallydoesn't hurt at all, but is only your imagination, and utters othersoothing remarks of that general nature. He then exchanges the crochetneedle for a kind of an instrument with a burr on the end of it. Thisinstrument first came into use at the time of the Spanish Inquisitionbut has since been greatly improved on and brought right up to date. Hetakes this handy little utensil and proceeds to stir up your imaginationsome more. You again try to say something, speaking in a muffled tone, but he is not listening. He is calling to a brother assassin inthe adjoining room to come and see a magnificent example of a primeold-vatted triple X exposed nerve. So the Second Grave Digger rests histools against the palate of his victim and comes in. 

As nearly as you can gather from hearsay evidence, you not being an eyewitness yourself, one of them harpoons the nerve just back of the gillswith a nutpick--remember please it is your nerve that they are takingall these liberties with--and pulls it out of its retreat and the otherman takes a tack hammer and tries to beat its brains out. Any time hemisses the nerve he hits you, so his average is still a thousand, andit is fine practice for him. A pleasant time is had by everybody presentexcept you and the nerve. The nerve wraps its hind legs around yourbreastbone and hangs on desperately. You perspire freely and make noiseslike a drunken Zulu trying to sing a Swedish folk song while holding aspoonful of hot mush in his mouth. 

In time becoming wearied even of these congenial diversions and tiringof the shop talk that has been going on, the second dentist returnsto his original prey and the party who has you in charge tries a newexperiment. He arms himself with a kind of an automatic hammeringmachine, somewhat similar to the steam riveter used in constructingsteel office buildings, except that this one is more compact and candeliver about eighty-five more blows to the second. Thus equipped, hedescends far below your high water mark and engages in aquatic sportsand pastimes for a considerable period of time. It seems to you that younever saw a man who could go down and stay down as long as this youngman can. You begin to feel that you misjudged his real vocation in lifewhen you decided that he ought to be a boiler maker. You know that hewas intended for pearl fishing. He's a natural born deep sea diver. Hedoesn't even have to come up to breathe, but stays below, knee deep inyour tide wash, merrily knocking chunks off your lowermost coral reefswith his little steam riveter and having a perfectly lovely time. 

You are overflowing copiously and you wish he would take the time tostop and bail you out. You abhor the idea of being drowned as an insidejob. But no, he keeps right on and along about here it is customary foryou to swoon away. 

On recovering, you observe that he has changed his mind again. He is nowgoing in for amateur theatricals and is using you for a theatre. Firstthoughtfully draping a little rubber drop curtain across your prosceniumarch to keep you from seeing what is going on behind your own scenes, heis setting the stage for the thrilling sawmill scene in Blue Jeans. Youcan distinctly feel the circular saw at work and you can taste a hod ofmortar and a bucket of hot tar and one thing and another that have beenleft in the wings. You also judge that the insulation is burning off ofan electric fixture somewhere up stage. 

All this time the tooth is still offering resistance, and eventually thedentist comes out in front once more and makes a little curtain speechto you. He has just ascertained that what the tooth really needed wasnot filling but pulling. He thought at first that it should be filledand that is what he has been doing--filling it--but now he knows thatpulling is the indicated procedure. He does not understand how a tooththat seemed so open could have deceived him. Nevertheless he will nowpull the tooth. 

He pulls her. She does her level best but he pulls her. He harvestssmall sections of the gum from time to time and occasionally he stopslong enough to loosen up the roots as far down as your floating ribs. But he pulls her. He spares no pains to pull that tooth. Or if he sparesany you are not able subsequently to remember what they were. You uttervarious loud sounds in a strange and incomprehensible language and helays back and braces his knees against your lower jaw, and the toothutters the death rattle and begins picking the cover-lid. And then hegives one final heave and breaks the roots away from the lower part ofyour spinal column to which they were adhering, and emerges into theopen panting but triumphant, and holds his trophy up for you to lookat. If you didn't know it was your tooth you would take it for anold-fashioned china cuspidor that had been neglected by the janitor. 

It was a tooth that you had been prizing for years, but now you wouldn'thave it as a gracious gift. You are through with that tooth forever. Younever want to see it again. 

As for the dentist, he collects the fixed charge for stumpage andcorkage and one thing and another and you come away with a feeling inthe side of your jaw like a vacant lot. Your tongue keeps going overthere to see if it can recognize the old place by the hole where thefoundations used to be. You never realized before what a basement therewas to a tooth. 

As you come out you pass a fresh victim going in and you see the dentistwelcome him and then turn to crank up his motor and you hear the canarytuning up with a new line of v-shaped twitters. And you are glad that heis the one who is going in and that you are the one who is coming out. 

Science tells us that the teeth are the hardest things in the humancomposition, which is all very well as far as it goes, but what scienceshould do is to go on and finish the sentence. It means the hardest tokeep. 

HAIR

As I remarked in the preceding chapter of this work, one of thepleasantest features about being born is that we are born without teethand other responsibilities. Teeth, like debts and installment payments, come along later on. It is the same way with hair. 

Born, we are, hairless or comparatively so. We are in a highlyincomplete state at that period of our lives. It takes a fond and dotingparent to detect evidences of an actual human aspect in us. Only theears and the mouth appear to be up to the plans and specifications. There is a mouth which when opened, as it generally is, makes therest of the face look like a tire, and there is a pair of ears ofsuch generous size that only a third one is needed, round at the backsomewhere, to give us the appearance of a loving cup. And we are smockedand hem-stitched with a million wrinkles apiece, more or less, whichpartly accounts for the fact that every newborn infant looks to be abouttwo hundred years old. And uniformly we have the nice red complexion ofa restaurant lobster. You know that live-broiled look?

As for our other features, they are more or less rudimentary. Of anose there is only what a chemist would call a trace. It seems hard toimagine that a dinky little nubbin like that, a dimple turned insideout, as it were, will ever develop into a regular nose, with a capacityfor freckling in the summer and catching cold in the winter--a nose thatyou can sneeze through and blow with. There are no eyebrows to speak ofeither, and the skull runs up to a sharp point like a pineapple cheese. Just back of the peak is a kind of soft, dented-in place like a ParkerHouse roll, and if you touch it we die. In some cases this spot remainssoft throughout life, and these persons grow up and go through railroadtrains in presidential years taking straw votes. 

And, as I said before, there isn't any hair; only on the slopes of thecheese are some very pale, faint, downy lines, which look as though theyhad been sketched on lightly with a very soft drawing pencil and wouldwipe off readily. That, however is the inception and beginning of whatafterward becomes, among our race, hair. To look at it you could hardlybelieve it, but it is. Barring accidents or backwardness, it continuesto grow from that time on through our childhood, but its behavior isalways a profound disappointment. If the child is a girl and, therefore, entitled to curly hair, her hair is sure to come in stiff and straight. If it's a boy, to whom curls will be a curse and a cross of affliction, he is morally certain to be as curly as a frizzly chicken, and untilhe gets old enough to rebel he will wear long ringlets and boys of hisacquaintance will insert cockle-burs and chewing gum into his tresses, and he will be known popularly as Sissie and otherwise his life with bemade joyous and carefree for him. If a reddish tone of hair is desiredit is certain to grow out yellow or brown or black; and if brown is yourfavorite shade you are absolutely sure to be nice and red-headed, witheyebrows and lashes to match, and so many cowlicks that when you removeyour hat people will think you're wearing two or three halos at once. Hair rarely or never acts up to its advance notices. 

One of the earliest and most painful recollections of my youth isassociated with hair. I still tingle warmly when I think of it. I shouldsay I was about eight years old at the time. My mother sent me down thestreet to the barber's to have my hair trimmed--shingled was the termthen used. Some of my private collection of cowlicks had begun tostand up in a way that invited adverse criticism and reminded peopleof sunbursts. They made me look as though my hair were trying to pullitself out by the roots and escape. So I was sent to the barber's. My little cousin, two years younger, went along in my charge. It wasthought that the performance might entertain her. I was mounted ina chair and had a cloth tucked in round my neck, like a self-mademillionaire about to eat consomme. The officiating barber got out ashiny steel instrument with jaws--the first pair of clippers I had everseen--and he ran this up the back of my neck, producing a most agreeablefeeling. He reached the top of my head and would have paused but I toldhim to go right ahead and clip me close all over, which he did. When hehad finished the job I was so delighted with the sensation and with theattendant result as viewed in a mirror that I suggested he might give mylittle cousin a similar treat. From a mere child I was ever so--willingalways to share my simple pleasures with those about me, especiallywhere it entailed no inconvenience on my part. I told him my fatherwould pay the bill for both of us when he came by that night. 

The barber fell in with the suggestion. It has ever been my experiencethat a barber will fall in readily with any suggestion whereby thebarber is going to get something out of it for himself. In this instancehe was going to get another quarter, and a quarter went farther inthose days than it does now. I dismounted from the chair and my innocentlittle cousin was installed in my place. As I now recall she made noprotest. The barber ran his clippers conscientiously and painstakinglyover her tender young scalp, while I stood admiringly by and watched thelong yellow curls fall writhing upon the floor at my feet. It seemedto me that a great and manifest improvement was produced in her generalappearance. Instead of being hampered by those silly curls dangling downall round her face, she now had a round, slick, smooth dome decoratedwith a stiff yellowish stubble, and the skin showed through nice andpink and the ears were well displayed, whereas before they had beenpractically hidden. She was also relieved of those foolish bangs hangingdown in her eyes. This, I should have stated, occurred in the periodwhen womankind of whatsoever age and also some men wore bangs, a diseasefrom which all have since recovered with the exception of racehorses andprincesses of the various reigning houses of Europe. And now my littlecousin was shut of those annoying bangs, and her forehead ran up so highthat you had to go round behind her to see where it left off. 

Filled with a joyous sense of achievement and conscious of a kindlydeed worthily performed, I took my little cousin by her hand and led herhome. 

My mother was waiting for us at the front door. She seemed surprisedwhen I took off my hat and gave her a look, but that wasn't acircumstance to her surprise when I proudly took off my little cousin'scap. She uttered a kind of a strangled cry and my cousin's mother camerunning, and the way she carried on was scandalous and ill-timed. I willdraw a veil over the proceedings of the next few minutes. At the time itwould have been a source of great personal gratification and comfort tome if I could have drawn a number of veils, good, thick, woolen ones, over the proceedings. My mother wept, my aunt wept, my little cousinwept, and I am not ashamed to state that I wept quite copiously myself. But I had more provocation to weep than any of them. 

When this part of the affair was over my mother sent me back to thebarber with a message. I was to say that a heart-broken woman demandedto have the curls of which her darling child had been denuded. I believethat there was some idea entertained of sewing them into a cap andrequiring my cousin to wear the cap until new ones had sprouted. Even tome, a mere child of eight, this seemed a foolish and totally unnecessaryproceeding, but the situation had already become so strained that Ithought it the part of prudence to go at once without offering anyarguments of my own. I felt, anyhow, that I would rather be away fromthe house for a while, until calmer second judgment had succeededexcitement and tumult. 

The man who owned the barber shop seemed surprised when I delivered themessage, but he told me to come back in a few minutes and he'd do whathe could. I drifted on down to the confectionery store at the corner toforget my sorrows for the moment in a worshipful admiration of a displayof prize boxes and cracknels in glass-front cases--you should be able tofix the period by the fact that cracknels and prize boxes were still invogue among the young. When I returned the head barber handed me quite alarge box--a shoebox--with a string tied round it. It did not seempossible to me that my cousin could have had a whole shoebox full ofcurls, but things had been going pretty badly that afternoon and mymotives had been misjudged and everything, so without any talk I tookthe box and hurried home with it. My mother cut the string and my auntlifted the lid. 

I should prefer again to draw a veil over the scenes that now ensued, but the necessity of finishing this narrative requires me to state thatit being a Saturday and the head barber being a busy man, he had nottaken time to sort out my cousin's curls from among the flotsam andjetsam of his establishment, but had just swept up enough off thefloor to make a good assorted boxful. I think the oldest inhabitant hadprobably dropped in that day to have himself trimmed up a little roundthe edges. I seem to remember a quantity of sandy whiskers shot withgray. There was enough hair in that box and enough different kinds andcolors of hair and stuff to satisfy almost any taste, you would havethought, but my mother and aunt were anything but satisfied. On thecontrary, far from it. And yet my cousin's hair was all there, if theyhad only been willing to spend a few days sorting it out and separatingit from the other contents. 

In this particular instance I was the exception to the rule, that hairgenerally gives a boy no great trouble from the time he merges out ofbabyhood until he puts on long pants and begins to discern somethingstrangely and subtly attractive about the sex described by Mr. Kiplingas being the more deadly of the species. During this interim it is amatter of no moment to a boy whether he goes shaggy or cropped, shorn orunshorn. At intervals a frugal parent trims him to see if both his earsare still there, or else a barber does it with more thoroughness, oftenrecovering small articles of household use that have been mysteriouslymissing for months; but in the main he goes along carefree andunbarbered, not greatly concerned with putting anything in his head ortaking anything off of it. 

In due season, though, he reaches the age where adolescent whiskers andyoung romance begin to sprout out on him simultaneously--and from thatmoment on for the rest of his life his hair is giving him bother, andplenty of it. 

Your hair gives you bother as long as you have it and more bother whenit starts to go. You are always doing something for it and it is alwaysshowing deep-dyed ingratitude in return; or else the dye isn't deepenough, which is even worse. Hair is responsible for such byproducts asdandruff, barbers, wigs, several comic weeklies, mental anguish, addedexpense, Chinese revolutions, and the standard joke about your wife'susing your best razor to open a can of tomatoes with. Hair has been ofaid to Buffalo Bill, Little Lord Fauntleroy, Samson, The Lady Godiva, Jo-Jo, the Dog-Faced Boy, poets, pianists, some artists and mostmattress makers, but a drawback and a sorrow to Absalom, polar bears incaptivity and the male sex in general. 

This assertion goes not only for hair on the head but for hair on theface. Let us consider for a moment the matter of shaving. If you shaveyourself you excite a barber's contempt, and there is nobody whosecontempt the average man dreads more than a barber's, unless it isa waiter's. And on the other hand, if you let a barber shave you heexcites not your contempt particularly, but your rage and frequentlyyour undying hatred. Once in a burst of confidence a barber told me oneof the trade secrets of his profession--he said that among barbers everyface fell into one of three classes, it being either a square, a roundor a squirrel. I know not, reader, whether yours be a square or around or a squirrel, but this much I will chance on a venture, sightunseen--that you have your periods of intense unhappiness when you arebeing shaved. 

I do not refer so much to the actual process of being shaved. Indeedthere is something restful and soothing to the average male adult inthe feel of a sharp razor being guided over a bristly jowl by a deftand skillful hand, to the accompaniment of a gentle grating sound andfollowed by a sensation of transient silken smoothness. Nor do I referto the barber's habit of conversation. After all, a barber is human--hehas to talk to somebody, and it might as well be you. If he didn't haveyou to talk to he'd have to talk to another barber, and that would be notreat to him. 

What I do refer to is that which precedes a shave and more especiallythat which follows after it. You rush in for a shave. In ten minutes youhave an engagement to be married or something else important, and youwant a shave and you want it quick. Does the barber take cognizance ofthe emergency? He does not. Such would be contrary to the ethics of hiscalling. Knowing from your own lips that you want a shave and that'spositively all, he nevertheless is instantly filled with a burningdesire to equip you with a large number of other things. In this regardthe barbering profession has much in common with the haberdasheringor gents'-furnishing profession as practiced in our larger cities. Youinvade a haberdashering establishment for the purpose, let us say, ofinvesting in a plain and simple pair of half hose, price twenty-fivecents. That emphatically is all that you do desire. You so state inplain, simple language, using the shorter and uglier word socks. 

Does the youth in the pale mauve shirt with the marquise ring on thelittle finger of the left hand rest content with this? Need I answerthis question? In succession he tries to sell you a fancy waistcoat withlarge pearl buttons, a broken lot of silk pajamas, a bath-robe, someshrimp-pink underwear--he wears this kind himself he tells you in strictconfidence--a pair of plush suspenders and a knitted necktie that youwouldn't be caught wearing at twelve o'clock at night at the bottom ofa coal mine during a total eclipse of the moon. If you resist hisblandishments and so far forget that you are a gentleman as to use harshlanguage, and if you insist on a pair of socks and nothing else, he'lllet you have them, but he will never feel the same toward you as he did. 

'Tis much the same with a barber. You need a shave in a hurry and he iswilling that you should have a shave, he being there for that purpose, but first and last he can think of upward of thirty or forty otherthings that you ought to have, including a shampoo, a hair cut, a hairsinge, a hair tonic, a hair oil, a manicure, a facial massage, a scalpmassage, a Turkish bath, his opinion on the merits of the newest WhiteHope, a shoeshine, some kind of a skin food, and a series of comparisonsof the weather we are having this time this month with the weather wewere having this time last month. Not all of us are gifted with thepower of repartee by which my friend Frisbee turned the edge of thebarber's desires. 

"Your hair, " said the barber, fondling a truant lock, "is long. "

"I know it is, " said Frisbee. "I like it long. It's so Roycrofty. "

"It is very long, " said the barber with a wistful expression. 

"I like it very long, " said Frisbee. "I like to have people come up tome on the street and call me Mr. Sutherland and ask me how I leftmy sisters? I like to be mistaken for a Russian pianist. I like forstrangers to stop me and ask me how's everything up at East Aurora. Inshort, I like it long. "

"Yes, sir, " said the barber, "quite so, sir; but it's very long, particularly here in the back--it covers your coat collar. "

"Indeed?" said Frisbee. "You say it covers my coat collar?"

"Yes, sir, " said the barber. "You can't see the coat collar at all. "

"Have you got a good sharp pair of shears there?" said Frisbee. 

"Oh, yes, sir, " said the barber. 

"All right then, " said Frisbee; "cut the collar off. "

But not all of us, as I said before, have this ready gift of parry andthrust that distinguishes my friend Frisbee. Mostly we weakly surrender. Or if we refuse to surrender, demanding just a shave by itself andnothing else, what then follows? In my own case, speaking personally, Iknow exactly what follows. I do not like to have any powder dabbed on myface when I am through shaving. I believe in letting the bloom of youthshow through your skin, providing you have any bloom of youth to doso. I always take pains to state my views in this regard at least twiceduring the operation of being shaved--once at the start when the barberhas me all lathered up, with soapsuds dripping from the flanges of myshell-like ears and running down my neck, and once again toward theclose of the operation, when he has laid aside his razor and is sousingmy defenseless features in a liquid that smells and tastes a good deallike those scented pink blotters they used to give away at drug-storesto advertise somebody's cologne. 

Does the barber respect my wishes in this regard? Certainly not. Heinsists on powdering me, either before my eyes or surreptitiously and ina clandestine manner. If he didn't powder me up he would lose his senseof self-respect, and probably the union would take his card awayfrom him. I think there is something in the constitution and by-lawsrequiring that I be powdered up. I have fought the good fight foryears, but I'm always powdered. Sometimes the crafty foe dissembles. Hepretends that he is not going to powder me up. But all of a sudden whenmy back is turned, as it were, he grabs up his powder swab and makes aquick swoop upon me and the hellish deed is done. I should be pleased tohear from other victims of this practice suggesting any practical reliefshort of homicide. I do not wish to kill a barber--there are severalother orders in ahead, referring to the persons I intend to kill offfirst--but I may be driven to it. 

After he has gashed me casually hither and yen, and sluiced down myhelpless countenance with the carefree abandon of a livery-stable handwashing off a buggy, and after, as above stated, he has covered up thetraces of his crime with powder, the barber next takes a towel and foldsit over his right hand, as prescribed in the rules and regulations, andthen he dabs me with that towel on various parts of my face nine hundredand seventy-four--974--separate and distinct times. I know the exactnumber of dabs because I have taken the trouble to keep count. I maybe in as great a hurry as you can imagine; I may be but a poor nervouswreck already, as I am; I may be quivering to be up and away from there, but he dabs me with his towel--he dabs me until reason totters on herthrone--sometimes just a tiny tot, as the saying goes, or it may be thatthe whole cerebral structure is involved--and then when he is apparentlyall through the Demoniac Dabber comes back and dabs me one morefiendish, deliberate and premeditated dab, making nine hundred andseventy-five dabs in all. He has to do it; it's in the ritual that I andyou and everybody must have that last dab. I wonder how many gibberingidiots there are in the asylum today whose reason was overthrown bybeing dabbed that last farewell dab. I know from my own experience thatI can feel the little dark-green gibbers sloshing round inside of meevery time it happens, and some day my mind will give away altogetherand there'll be a hurry call sent in for the wagon with the lock on theback door. Yet it is of no avail to cavil or protest; we cannot hope toescape; we can only sit there in mute and helpless misery and be filledwith a great envy for Mexican hairless dogs. 

For quite a spell now we have been speaking of hair on the face; at thispoint we revert to hair in its relation to the head. There are some fewamong us, mainly professional Southerners and leading men, who retainthe bulk of the hair on their heads through life; but with most of usthe circumstances are different. Your hair goes from you. You don'tseem to notice it at first; then all of a sudden you wake up to therealization that your head is working its way up through the hair. Youstart in then desperately doing things for your hair in the hope ofinducing it to stick round the old place a while longer, but it hasheard the call of the wild and it is on its way. There's no detainingit. You soak your skull in lotions until your brain softens and yourhat-band gets moldy from the damp, but your hair keeps right on going. 

After a while it is practically gone. If only about two-thirds of it isgone your head looks like a great auk's egg in a snug nest; but ifmost of it goes there is something about you that suggests the GlacialPeriod, with an icy barren peak rising high above the vegetation line, where a thin line of heroic strands still cling to the slopes. You arebald then, a subject fit for the japes of the wicked and universallycoupled in the betting with onions, with hard-boiled eggs and with thefront row of orchestra chairs at a musical show. 

At this time of writing baldness is creeping insidiously up each side ofmy head. It is executing flank movements from the temples northward, andsome day the two columns will meet and after that I'll be considerablymore of a highbrow than I am now. At present I am craftily combing theremaining thatch in the middle and smoothing it out nice and flat, soas to keep those bare spots covered--thinly perhaps, but neverthelesscovered. It is my earnest desire to continue to keep them covered. Iam not a professional beauty; I am not even what you would call a goodamateur beauty; and I want to make what little hair I have go as far asit conveniently can. But does the barber to whom I repair at frequentintervals coincide with my desires in this respect? Again I reply hedoes not. Every time I go in I speak to him about it. I say to him:"Woodman, spare that hair, touch not a single strand; in youth itsheltered me and I'll protect it now. " Or in substance that. 

He says yes, he will, but he doesn't mean it. He waits until he cancatch me with my guard down. Then he seizes a comb, and using the edgeof his left hand as a bevel and operating his right with a sort offree-arm Spencerian movement, he roaches my hair up in a scallop effecton either side, and upon reaching the crest he fights with it andwrestles with it until he makes it stand erect in a feather-edgeddesign. I can tell by his expression that he is pleased with thisarrangement. He loves to send his victims forth into the world tuftedlike the fretful cockatoo. He likes to see surging waves of hair dashhigh on a stern and rockbound head. His sense of the artistic demandssuch a result. 

What cares he how I feel about it so long as the higher cravings ofhis own nature are satisfied? But I resent it--I resent it bitterly. I object to having my head look like a real-estate development with anopening for a new street going up each side and an ornamental design infancy landscape gardening across the top. If I permit this I won't beable to keep on saying that I was twenty-seven on my last birthday, withsome hope of getting away with it. So I insist that he put my fronthair right back where he found it. He does so, under protest andbegrudgingly, it is true, but he does it. And then, watching hisopportunity, he runs in on me and overpowers me and roaches it up somemore. 

If I weaken and submit he is happy as the day is long. If he gets itroached up on both sides that will make me look like a horizontal-barperformer, which is his idea of manly beauty. Or if he gets it roachedup on one side only there is still some consolation in it for him I'mliable to be mistaken anywhere for a trained-animal performer. But oncein a very great while he doesn't get it roached up on either side, buthas to stand there and suffer as he sees me walk forth into the worldwith my hair combed to suit me and not him. I can tell by his look thathe is grieved and downcast, and that he will probably go home and becross to the children. He has but one solace--he hopes to have betterluck with me next time. And probably he will. 

The last age of hair is a wig. But wigs are not so very satisfactoryeither. I've seen all the known varieties of wigs, and I never saw oneyet that looked as though it were even on speaking terms with the headthat was under it. A wig always looks as though it were a total strangerto the head and had just lit there a minute to rest, preparatory toflying along to the next head. Nevertheless, I think on the whole I'llbe happier when my time comes to wear one, because then no barber canroach me up. 

HANDS AND FEET

Nearly every boy has a period in his life when he is filled withan envious admiration for the East India god with the extra set ofarms--Vishnu, I think this party's name is. To a small boy it seems agrand thing to have a really adequate assortment of hands. He considersthe advantage of such an arrangement in school--two hands in plain viewabove the desk holding McGuffy's Fourth Reader at the proper angle forstudy and the other two out of sight, down underneath the desk engagedin manufacturing paper wads or playing crack-a-loo or some other reallyworth while employment. 

Or for robbing birds' nests. There would be two hands for use inskinning up the tree, and one hand for scaring off the mother bird andone hand for stealing the eggs. And for hanging on behind wagons thecombination positively could not be beaten. Then there would be thegaudy conspicuousness of going around with four arms weaving in andout in a kind of spidery effect while less favored boys were forced tocontent themselves with just an ordinary and insufficient pair. Really, there was only one drawback to the contemplation of this scheme--there'dbe twice as many hands to wash when company was coming to dinner. 

Generally speaking a boy's hands give him no serious concern during thefirst few years of his life except at such times as his mother growsofficious and fussy and insists that they ought to be washed up as faras the regular place for washing a boy's hands, to wit, about midwaybetween the knuckles and the wrist. The fact that one finger is usuallyin a state of mashedness is no drawback, but a benefit. The presenceof a soiled rag around a finger gives to a boy's hand a touch ofdistinctiveness--singles it out from ordinary unmaimed hands. Itspresence has been known to excuse its happy possessor from such choresas bringing in wood for the kitchen stove or pulling dock weeds out ofthe grass in a front yard where it would be much easier and quicker topull the grass out of the dock weeds. It may even be made a source ofprofit by removing the wrappings and charging two china marbles a look. I seem to recall that in the case of a specially attractive injury, suchas a thumb nail knocked off or a deep cut which has refused to heal byfirst intention or an imbedded splinter in process of being drawn outby a scrap of fat meat, that as much as four china marbles could becharged. 

On the Fourth of July you occasionally burned your hands and in coldwinters they chapped extensively across the knuckles but these were butthe marks and scars of honorable endeavor and a hardy endurance. Inour set the boy whose knuckles had the deepest cracks in them wasa prominent and admired figure, crowned, as you might say, with animaginary chaplet by reason of his chaps. 

With girls, of course, it was different. 

Girls were superfluous and unnecessary creatures with a false andinflated idea of the value of soap and water. Their hands weren'tgood for much anyway. Later on we discovered that a girl's hands wereexcellent for holding purposes in a hammock or while coming back froma straw ride, but I am speaking now of the earlier stages of ourdevelopment, before the presence of the ostensibly weaker sex began toawaken responsive throbs in our several bosoms--in short when girls weremerely nuisances and things to be ignored whenever possible. In thatearly stage of his existence hands have no altruistic or sentimental orornamental value for a boy--they are for useful purposes altogether andare regarded as such. 

It is only when he has reached the age of tail coats and spike-fencecollars that he discovers two hands are frequently too many and oftennot enough. They are too many at your first church wedding when wearingyour first pair of white kids and they are not enough at a five o'clocktea. There is a type of male who can go to a five o'clock tea and notfall over a lot of Louie Kahn's furniture or get himself hopelesslytangled up in a hanging drapery and who can seem perfectly at ease whileholding in his hands a walking stick, a pair of dove colored gloves, a two-quart hat, a cup of tea with a slice of lemon peel in it, a teaspoon, a lump of sugar, a seed cookie, an olive, and the hand of a ladywith whom he is discussing the true meaning of the message of the lateIbsen but these gifted mortals are not common. They are rare and exotic. There are also some few who can do ushing at a church wedding with apair of white kids on and not appear overly self-conscious. These arealso the exceptions. The great majority of us suffer visibly undersuch circumstances. You have the feeling that each hand weighs fullytwenty-four pounds and that it is hanging out of the sleeve for adistance of about one and three-quarters yards and you don't know whatto do with your hands and on the whole would feel much more comfortableand decorative if they were both sawed off at the wrists and hidden someplace where you couldn't find 'em. You have that feeling and you lookit. You look as though you were working in a plaster of paris factoryand were carrying home a couple of large sacks of samples. It would begrand to be a Vishnu at a five o'clock tea, but awful to be one at achurch wedding. 

About the time you find yourself embarking on a career of teas andweddings you also begin to find yourself worrying about the appearanceof your hands. Up until now the hands have given you no great concernone way or the other, but some day you wake to the realization that youneed to be manicured. Once you catch that disease there is no hope foryou. There are ways of curing you of almost any habit except manicuring. You get so that you aren't satisfied unless your nails run down about aquarter of an inch further than nails were originally intended to run, and unless they glitter freely you feel strangely distraught in company. Inasmuch as no male creature's finger nails will glitter with thedesired degree of brilliancy for more than twenty-four short andfleeting hours after a treatment you find yourself constantly in theact of either just getting a manicure or just getting over one. It isan expensive habit, too; it takes time and it takes money. There's thefixed charge for manicuring in the first place and then there's the tip. Once there was a manicure lady who wouldn't take a tip, but she is nowno more. Her indignant sisters stabbed her to death with hat pins andnail-files. Manicuring as a public profession is a comparatively recentdevelopment of our civilization. The fathers of the republic and thefounders of the constitution, which was founded first and has beenfoundering ever since if you can believe what a lot of people inCongress say--they knew nothing of manicuring. Speaking by and large, they only got their thumbs wet when doing one of three things--taking abath, going in swimming or turning a page in a book. Washington probablywas never manicured nor Jefferson nor Franklin; it's a cinch that DanielBoone and Israel Putnam and George Rogers Clark weren't and yet it isgenerally conceded that they got along fairly well without it. But asthe campaign orators are forever pointing out from the hustlers and theforum, this is an age calling for change and advancement. And manicuringis one of the advancements that likewise calls for the change--for fiftycents in change anyhow and more if you are inclined to be generous withthe tip. 

Shall you ever forget your first manicure? The shan'ts are unanimouslyin the majority. It seems an easy thing to walk into a manicure parloror a barber shop and shove your hands across a little table to a strangeyoung woman and tell her to go ahead and shine 'em up a bit--the way youhear old veteran manicurees saying it. It seems easy, I say, and lookseasy; but it isn't as easy as it seems. Until you get hardened, itrequires courage of a very high order. You, the abashed novice, seeother men sitting in the front window of the manicure shop just asdebonair and cozy as though they'd been born and raised there, swappingthe ready repartee of the day with dashing creatures of a frequentlyblonde aspect, and you imagine they have always done so. You little knowthat these persons who are now appearing so much at home and who cansnap out those bright, witty things like "I gotcher Steve, " and "Well, see who's here?" without a moment's hesitation and without having tostop and think for the right word or the right phrase but have it rightthere on the tip of the tongue--you little reck that they too passedthrough the same initiation which you now contemplate. Yet such is thecase. 

You have dress rehearsals--private ones--in your room. In the seclusionof your bed chamber you picture yourself opening the door of the marblemanicure hall and stepping in with a brisk yet graceful tread--likeJames K. Hackett making an entrance in the first act--and glancing aboutyou casually--like John Drew counting up the house--and saying "Hellogirlies, how're all the little Heart's Delights this afternoon?" justlike that, and picking out the most sumptuous and attractive of theflattered young ladies in waiting; and sinking easily into the chairopposite her--see photos of William Faversham and throwing the coatlapels back, at the same time resting the left hand clenched upon theupper thigh with the elbow well out--Donald Brian asking a lady towaltz--and offering the right hand to the favored female and telling herto go as far as she likes with it. It sounds simple when you figuring itout alone, but it rarely works out that way in practice. It is my beliefthat every woman longs for the novelty of a Turkish bath and every manfor the novelty of a manicure long before either dares to tackle it. I may be wrong but this is my belief. And in the case of the man heusually makes a number of false starts. 

You go to the portals and hesitate and then, stumbling across thethreshold, you either dive on through to the barber shop--if there is abarber shop in connection--or else you mumble something about being ina hurry and coming back again, and retreat with all the grace and easethat would be shown by a hard shell crab that was trying to back intothe mouth of a milk-bottle. You are likely to do this several times;but finally some day you stick. You slump down into one of those littlechairs and offer your hands or one of them to a calm and slightlyarrogant looking young lady and you tell her to please shine them upa little. You endeavor to appear as though you had been doing thisat frequent periods stretching through a great number of years, butshe--bless her little heart!--she knows better than that. The femaleof the manicuring species is not to be deceived by any such cheap andtransparent artifices. If you wore a peekaboo waist she couldn't seethrough you any easier. Your hands would give you away if your facedidn't. In a sibulent aside, she addresses the young lady at the nexttable--the one with the nine bracelets and the hair done up delicatessenstore mode--sausages, rolls and buns--whereupon both of them laugh ina significant, silvery way, and you feel the back of your neck settingyour collar on fire. You can smell the bone button back there scorchingand you're glad it's not celluloid, celluloid being more inflammable andsubject to combustion when subjected to intense heat. 

When both have laughed their merry fill, the young woman who has you incharge looks you right in the eye and says:

"Dearie me; you'll pardon me saying so, but your nails are in aperfectly turrible state. I don't think I've seen a jumpman's nails insuch a state for ever so long. Pardon me again--but how long has it beensince you had them did?"

To which you reply in what is meant to be a jaunty and off-hand tone:

"Oh quite some little while. I've--I've been out of town. "

"That's what I thought, " she says with a slight shrug. It isn't so muchwhat she says--it's the way she says it, the tone and all that, whichmakes you feel smaller and smaller until you could crawl into your ownwatch pocket and live happily there ever after. There'd be slews ofroom and when you wanted the air of an evening you could climb up in abuttonhole of your vest and be quite cosy and comfortable. But shrinkas you may, there is now no hope of escape, for she has reached out andgrabbed you firmly by the wrist. She has you fast. You have a feelingthat eight or nine thousand people have assembled behind you and are allgazing fixedly into the small of your back. The only things about youthat haven't shrivelled up are your hands. You can feel them growinglarger and larger and redder and redder and more prominent andconspicuous every instant. 

The lady begins operations. You are astonished to note how many toolsand implements it takes to manicure a pair of hands properly. The top ofher little table is full of them and she pulls open a drawer and showsyou some more, ranged in rows. There are files and steel biters andpigeon-toed scissors and scrapers and polishers and things; and wads ofcotton with which to staunch the blood of the wounded, and bottles ofliquid and little medicinal looking jars full of red paste; and a cutglass crock with soap suds in it and a whole lot of little orange woodstobbers. 

In the interest of truth I have taken the pains to enquire and I haveascertained that these stobbers are invariably of orange wood. Say whatyou will, the orange tree is a hardy growth. Every February you read inthe papers that the Florida orange crop, for the third consecutive timesince Christmas has been entirely and totally destroyed by frost and yetthere is always an adequate supply on hand of the principal productsof the orange-phosphate for the soda fountains, blossoms for the bride, political sentiment for the North of Ireland and little sharp stobbersfor the manicure lady. Speaking as an outsider I would say that thereought to be other varieties of wood that would serve as well and bringabout the desired results as readily--a good thorny variety of poisonivy ought to fill the bill, I should think. But it seems that orangewood is absolutely essential. A manicure lady could no more do amanicure properly without using an orange wood stobber at certainperiods than a cartoonist could draw a picture of a man in jail withoutputting a ball and chain on him or a summer resort could get alongwithout a Lover's Leap within easy walking distance of the hotel. Itsimply isn't done, that's all. 

Well, as I was saying, she gets out her tool kit and goes to workon you. You didn't dream that there were so many things--mainly ofa painful nature--that could be done to a single finger nail and youflinch as you suddenly remember that you have ten of them in all, counting thumbs in with fingers. She takes a finger nail in hand and shefiles it and she trims it and she softens it with hot water and hardensit with chemicals and parboils it a little while and then she cuts offthe hang nails--if there aren't any hang nails there already she'llmake a few--and she shears away enough extra cuticle to cover quite agood-sized little boy. She goes over you with a bristle brush, and warmsup your nerve ends until you tingle clear back to your dorsal fin andthen she takes one of those orange wood stobbers previously referred to, and goes on an exploring expedition down under the nail, looking for thequick. She always finds it. There is no record of a failure to findthe quick. Having found it she proceeds to wake it up and teach it someparlor tricks. I may not have set forth all these various details in theexact order in which they take place, but I know she does them all. Andsomewhere along about the time when she is half way through with thefirst hand she makes you put the other hand in the suds. 

Later on when you have had more practice at this thing you learn to waitfor the signal before plunging the second hand into the suds, but beinggreen on this occasion, you are apt to mistake the moving of the crockof suds over from the right hand side to the left hand side as a noticeand to poke your untouched hand right in without further orders, hopingto get it softened up well so as to save her trouble in trimming it downto a size which will suit her. But this is wrong--this is very wrong, as she tells you promptly, with a pitying smile for your ignorance. Manicure girls are as careful about boiling a hand as some particularpeople are about bailing their eggs for breakfast of a morning. A twominute hand is no pleasure to her absolutely if she has diagnosed yourhand as one calling for six minutes, or vice versa. So, should you errin this regard she will snatch the offending hand out and wipe it offand give it back to you and tell you to keep it in a dry place until shecalls for it. Manicure girls are very funny that way. 

Thus time passes on and on and by degrees you begin to feel more andmore at home. Your bashfulness is wearing off. The coherent power ofspeech has returned to you and you have exchanged views with her on therelative merits of the better known brands of chewing gum and which kindholds the flavor longest, and you have swapped ideas on the issue ofwhether ladies should or should not smoke cigarettes in public and sheknows how much your stick pin cost you and you know what her favoriteflower is. You are getting along fine, when all of a sudden she dabsyour nails with a red paste and then snatches up a kind of a polishingtool and ferociously rubs your fingers until they catch on fire. Justwhen the conflagration threatens to become general she stops using thepolisher and proceeds to cool down the ruins by gently burnishing yournails against the soft, pink palm of her hand. You like this better thanthe other way. You could ignite yourself by friction almost any time, if you got hold of the right kind of a chamois skin rubber, but this isquite different and highly soothing. You are beginning to really enjoythe sensation when she roguishly pats the back of your hand--pittypat--as a signal that the operation is now over. You pay the check andtip the lady--tip her fifty cents if you wish to be regarded as a lovelyjumpman or only twenty-five cents if you are satisfied with being avurry nice fella--and you secure your hat and step forth into the openwith the feeling of one who has taken a trip into a distant domain andon the whole has rather enjoyed it. 

You stand in the sunlight and waggle your fingers and you are struckwith the desirable glitter that flits from finger tip to finger tiplike a heleograph winking on a mountain top. It is indeed a pleasingspectacle. You decide that hereafter you will always glitter so. It ischeaper than wearing diamonds and much more refined, and so you takegood care of your fingers all that day and carefully refrain fromdipping them in the brine while engaged in the well known indoor sportof spearing for dill pickles at the business men's lunch. 

But the next morning when you wake up the desirable glitter is gone. You only glimmer dully--your fingers do not sparkle and dazzle andscintillate as they did. As Francois Villon, the French poet wouldundoubtedly have said had manicures been known at the time he waswriting his poems, "Where are the manicures of yesterday?" instead ofmaking it, "Where are the snows of yesteryear?" there being no answerready for either question, except that the manicures of yesterday likethe snows of yesteryear are never there when you start looking for them. They have just naturally got up and gone away, leaving no forwardingaddress. 

You have now been launched upon your career as a manicuree. You neverget over it. You either get married and your wife does your nails foryou, thus saving you large sums of money, but failing to impart the highdegree of polish and the spice of romance noticed in connection withthe same job when done away from home, or you continue to patronize theregular establishments and become known in time as Polished Percival, the Pet of the Manicure Parlor. But in either event your hands whichonce were hands and nothing more, have become a source of added troubleand expense to you. 

Speaking of hands naturally brings one to the subject of feet, which wasintended originally to be the theme for the last half of this chapter, but unfortunately I find I have devoted so much space to your hands thatthere is but little room left for your feet and so far as your feet areconcerned, we must content ourselves on this occasion with a few generalstatements. 

Feet, I take it, speaking both from experience and observation, are evenmore trouble to us than hands are. There are still a good many of usleft who go through life without doing anything much for our hands butwith our feet it is different. They thrust themselves upon us so tospeak, demanding care and attention. This goes for all sizes and allages of feet. From the time you are a small boy and suffer from stonebruises in the summer and chilblains in the winter, on through lifeyou're beset with corns and callouses and falling of the instep and allthe other ills that feet are heir to. 

The rich limp with the gout, the moderately well to do contentthemselves with an active ingrown nail or so, and the poor man goes outand drops an iron casting on his toe. Nearly every male who lives toreach the voting age has a period of mental weakness in his youth whenhe wears those pointed shoes that turn up at the ends, like sleighrunners; and spends the rest of his life regretting it. Feet arecertainly ungrateful things. I might say that they are proverbiallyungrateful. You do for them and they do you. You get one corn, hard orsoft, cured up or removed bodily and a whole crowd of its relativescome to take its place. I imagine that Nature intended we should gobarefooted and is now getting even with us because we didn't. Our poor, painful feet go with us through all the years and every step in life ismarked by a pang of some sort. And right on up to the end of our days, our feet are getting more infirm and more troublesome and more crotchetyand harder to bear with all the time. How many are there right nowwho have one foot in the grave and the other at the chiropodist's?Thousands, I reckon. 

Napoleon said an army traveled on its stomach. I don't blame the army, far from it; I've often wished I could travel that way myself, andI've no doubt so has every other man who ever crowded a number nine andthree-quarters foot into a number eight patent-leather shoe, and thenwent to call on friends residing in a steam-heated apartment. As whatman has not? Once the green-corn dance was an exclusive thing with theSioux Indians, but it may now be witnessed when one man steps on anotherman's toes in a crowd. 

We are accustomed to make fun of the humble worm of the dust but inone respect the humble worm certainly has it on us. He goes throughexistence without any hands and any feet to bother him. Indeed in thisregard I can think of but one creature in all creation who is worse offthan we poor humans are. That is the lowly ear wig. Think of being anear wig, that suffers from fallen arches himself and has a wife thatsuffers from cold feet!