s in about the
normal proportion. Within the relatively brief compass of the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries, I, who would have gone smooth-shaven in the
fourteenth, could conceivably have fluttered in at least thirty-eight
separate and beautiful arrangements of moustaches, beard, and whiskers.
Nor, I suspect, did these arrangements always wait upon the slow
processes of nature. One does not _have_ to grow whiskers. Napoleon's
youthful officers were fiercely bewhiskered, but often with the aid of
helpfully adhesive gum; and in the eighteen-thirties there occurs in the
Boston _Transcript_, as a matter of course, an advertisement of
'gentlemen's whiskers ready-made or to order.' We see in imagination a
quiet corner at the whisker's, with a mirror before which the Bostonian
tries on his ready-made whiskers before ordering them sent home; or
again, the Bostonian in doubt, selecting now this whisker, now that
from the _Gentlemen's Own Whisker Book_, and still with a shade of
indecision on his handsome face as he holds it up to be measured.
'Perhaps, after all, those _other_ whiskers--'

But the brisk, courteous person with the dividers and tape-measure is
reassuring. 'Elegant whiskers!' he repeats at intervals. 'They will do
us both credit.'

The matter has, in fact, been intelligently studied; the beautifying
effect of whiskers reduced to principles. If my face is too wide, a
beard lengthens it; if my face is too narrow, it expands as if by magic
with the addition of what have sometimes been affectionately called
'mutton chops,' or 'siders'; if my nose projects, almost like a nose
trying to escape from a face to which it has been sentenced for life, a
pair of large, handsome moustaches will provide a proper entourage--a
nest, so to speak, on which the nose rests contentedly, almost like a
setting hen; if my nose retreats backward into my face, the aesthetic
solution is obviously galways. A stout gentleman can do wonders with his
appearance by adopting a pointed beard, and a suit of clothes, shirt,
necktie, and stockings with pronounced vertical stripes. A thin one, on
the other hand, becomes at once substantial in effect, without being
gross, if he cultivates side-whiskers, and wears a suit of clothes,
shirt, cravat, and stockings with pronounced horizontal stripes. If my
face lacks fierceness and dynamic force, it needs a brisk, arrogant
moustache; or if it has too much of these qualities, a long, sad,
drooping moust