here, while
you live, nobody will ever disturb them. Once, indeed, I--but this is
getting too personal: I was simply about to say that it is possible to
purchase a twenty-five cent safety-razor, returnable if unsatisfactory,
and find the place of sale vanished before you can get back to it. But
between inventions in safety-razors, the extraordinary-safety shaver is
likely to revert to first principles and the naked steel of his
ancestors.

And as he shaves he will perhaps think sometimes of the unhappy Edward
II of England, who, before his fall, wore his beard in three corkscrew
curls--and was shaved afterward by a cruel jailer who had it done _with
cold water_! The fallen monarch wept with discomfort and indignation.
'Here at least,' he exclaimed reproachfully, 'is warm water on my
cheeks, whether you will or no.' But the heartless shave proceeded.
Razed away were those corkscrew curls from the royal chin, and so he
comes down to us without them, shaved as well as bathed in tears--one
of the most pitiful figures in history.

Personally, however, I prefer to think of kindlier scenes while shaving.
Nothing that I can do now can help poor Edward: no indignation of mine
can warm that cold water; perhaps, after all, the cruel jailer had a
natural and excusable hatred of corkscrew curls anywhere. I should feel
quite differently about it if he had warmed the water; but although a
man may shave himself with cold water, certainly nobody else has a right
to.

There have been periods in the history of man when I, too, would
probably have cultivated some form of whiskering. Perhaps, like Mr.
Richard Shute, I would have kept a gentleman (reduced) to read aloud to
me while my valet starched and curled my whiskers--such being the mode
in the seventeenth century when Mr. Shute was what they then called,
without meaning offense, a turkey merchant; and indeed his pride in his
whiskers was nothing out of the common. Or, being less able to support a
valet to starch and curl, and a gentleman to read aloud 'on some useful
subject,'--poor gentleman! I hope that he and Mr. Shute agreed as to
what subjects were useful, but I have a feeling they didn't,--I might
have had to economize, and might have been one of those who were 'so
curious in the management of their beards that they had pasteboard cases
to put over them at night, lest they turn upon them and rumple them in
their sleep.'

Nevertheless, wives continued to respect their husband