cond my habit of eating welsh-rarebits late of
nights. Over my bed I have a gas-jet so properly shaded that the rays
of light are concentrated and reflected downward upon the volume which
I am reading.

Miss Susan insists that much of this light and its attendant heat falls
upon my head, compelling there a dryness of the scalp whereby the
follicles have been deprived of their natural nourishment and have
consequently died. She furthermore maintains that the welsh-rarebits
of which I partake invariably at the eleventh hour every night breed
poisonous vapors and subtle megrims within my stomach, which humors,
rising by their natural courses to my brain, do therein produce a
fever that from within burneth up the fluids necessary to a healthy
condition of the capillary growth upon the super-adjacent and exterior
cranial integument.

Now, this very declaration of Miss Susan's gives me a potent argument
in defence of my practices, for, being bald, would not a neglect of
those means whereby warmth is engendered where it is needed result in
colds, quinsies, asthmas, and a thousand other banes? The same
benignant Providence which, according to Laurence Sterne, tempereth the
wind to the shorn lamb provideth defence and protection for the bald.
Had I not loved books, the soul in my midriff had not done away with
those capillary vestiges of my simian ancestry which originally
flourished upon my scalp; had I not become bald, the delights and
profits of reading in bed might never have fallen to my lot.

And indeed baldness has its compensations; when I look about me and see
the time, the energy, and the money that are continually expended upon
the nurture and tending of the hair, I am thankful that my lot is what
it is. For now my money is applied to the buying of books, and my time
and energy are devoted to the reading of them.

To thy vain employments, thou becurled and pomaded Absalom! Sweeter
than thy unguents and cosmetics and Sabean perfumes is the smell of
those old books of mine, which from the years and from the ship's hold
and from constant companionship with sages and philosophers have
acquired a fragrance that exalteth the soul and quickeneth the
intellectuals! Let me paraphrase my dear Chaucer and tell thee, thou
waster of substances, that

For me was lever han at my beddes hed
A twenty bokes, clothed in black and red
Of Aristotle and his philosophie,
Than robes rich, or fidel, or sa