tleman. But the
sinewy young man who is sitting in the front parlor reading the Hammer
Thrower's Gazette, welcomes you with a false air of gaiety entirely out
of keeping with the circumstances and invites you to step right in. He
tells you that you are next. This is wrong--if you were next you would
turn and flee like a deer. Not being next, you enter. Right from the
start you seem to take a dislike to this young man. You catch him
spitting in his hands and hitching his sleeves up as you are hanging up
your hat. Besides he is too robust for a dentist. With those shoulders
he ought to be a boiler maker or a safe mover or something of that sort.
You resolve inwardly that next time you go to a dentist you are going to
one of a more lady-like bearing and gentler demeanor. It seems a
brutal thing that a big strong man should waste his years in a dental
establishment when the world is clamoring for strong men to do the heavy
lifting jobs. But before you can say anything, this muscular athlete has
laid violent hands on your palpitating form and wadded it abruptly into
the hideous embraces of a red plush chair, which looks something like
the one they use up at Sing Sing, only it's done more quickly up there
and with less suffering on the part of the condemned. On one side of
you you behold quite a display of open plumbing and on the other side
a tasty exhibit of small steel tools of assorted sizes. No matter which
way your gaze may stray you'll be seeing something attractive.

You also take notice of an electric motor about large enough, you would
say, to run a trolley car, which is purring nearby in a sinister and
forbidding way. They are constantly making these little improvements
in the dental profession. I have heard that fifty years ago a dentist
traveled about over the country from place to place, sometimes pulling a
tooth and sometimes breaking a colt. He practiced his art with an outfit
consisting of two pairs of iron forceps--one pair being saber-toothed
while the other pair was merely saw-fretted--and he gave a man the same
kind of treatment he gave a horse, only he tied the horse's legs first.
But now electricity is in general use and no dentist's establishment is
complete without a dynamo attachment which makes a crooning sound when
in operation and provides instrumental accompaniment to the song of the
official canary.

I know why a barber in a country town is always learning to play on the
guitar and I know why a