rsonal pronoun and speak of them as your
teeth from now on. If anybody has to suffer it might as well be you and
not me; I expect to be busy telling about it. As I started to say awhile
ago, you--remember it's you from this point--you get your regular teeth
and they start right in giving you trouble. Every little while one of
them bursts from its cell with a horrible yell and in the lulls between
pangs you go forth among men with the haunted look in your eye of one
who is listening for the footfalls of a dread apparition, and one half
of your head is puffed out of plumb as though you were engaged in the
whimsical idea of holding an egg plant in the side of your jaw. A kind
friend meets you, and, speaking with that high courage and that lofty
spirit of sacrifice which a kind friend always exhibits when it's your
tooth that is kicking up the rumpus and not his, he tells you you ought
to have something done for it right away. You know that as well as he
does, but you hate to have the subject brought up. It's your toothache
anyhow. It originated with you. You are its proud parent but not so
awfully proud at that. Mother and child doing as well as could be
expected, but not expected to do very well.

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

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

But all along there is gener