eir faces covered with soap,
and their noses used as convenient handles to turn first one cheek and
then the other--that is his own lookout. But human ingenuity has yet to
invent a 'safety barber's shears.' It has tried. A near genius once
invented an apparatus--a kind of helmet with multitudinous little
scissors inside it--which he hopefully believed would solve the problem;
but what became of him and his invention I have not heard. Perhaps he
tried it himself and slunk, defeated, into a deeper obscurity. Perhaps
he committed suicide; for one can easily imagine that a man who thought
he had found a way to cut his own hair and then found that he hadn't,
would be thrown into a suicidal depression. There is the possibility
that he succeeded in cutting his own hair, and was immediately 'put
away,' by his sensitive family where nobody could see him but the
hardened attendants. The important fact is that the invention never got
on the market. Until some other investigator succeeds to more practical
purpose, the rest of us must go periodically to the barber. We must put
on the bib--

Here, however, there is at least an opportunity of selection. There are
bibs with arms, and bibs without arms. And there is a certain amount of
satisfaction in being able to see our own hands, carefully holding the
newspaper or periodical wherewith we pretend that we are still
intelligent human beings. And here again are distinctions. The patrons
of my own favored barber's shop have arms to their bibs and pretend to
be deeply interested in the _Illustrated London News_. The patrons of
the barber's shop where I lost part of my ear--I cannot see the place,
but those whom I take into my confidence tell me that it has long since
grown again--had no sleeves to their bibs, but nevertheless managed
awkwardly to hold the _Police Gazette_. And this opportunity to hold the
_Police Gazette_ without attracting attention becomes a pleasant feature
of this type of barber's shop: I, for example, found it easier--until my
ear was cut--to forget my position in the examination of this journal
than in the examination of the _Illustrated London News_. The pictures,
strictly speaking, are not so good, either artistically or morally, but
there is a tang about them, an I-do-not-know-what. And it is always
wisest to focus attention on some such extraneous interest. Otherwise
you may get to looking in the mirror.

Do not do that.

For one thing, there is the impulse t