for a considerable period of time. It seems to you that you
never saw a man who could go down and stay down as long as this young
man can. You begin to feel that you misjudged his real vocation in life
when you decided that he ought to be a boiler maker. You know that he
was intended for pearl fishing. He's a natural born deep sea diver. He
doesn't even have to come up to breathe, but stays below, knee deep in
your tide wash, merrily knocking chunks off your lowermost coral reefs
with his little steam riveter and having a perfectly lovely time.

You are overflowing copiously and you wish he would take the time to
stop and bail you out. You abhor the idea of being drowned as an inside
job. But no, he keeps right on and along about here it is customary for
you to swoon away.

On recovering, you observe that he has changed his mind again. He is now
going in for amateur theatricals and is using you for a theatre. First
thoughtfully draping a little rubber drop curtain across your proscenium
arch to keep you from seeing what is going on behind your own scenes, he
is setting the stage for the thrilling sawmill scene in Blue Jeans. You
can distinctly feel the circular saw at work and you can taste a hod of
mortar and a bucket of hot tar and one thing and another that have been
left in the wings. You also judge that the insulation is burning off of
an electric fixture somewhere up stage.

All this time the tooth is still offering resistance, and eventually the
dentist comes out in front once more and makes a little curtain speech
to you. He has just ascertained that what the tooth really needed was
not filling but pulling. He thought at first that it should be filled
and that is what he has been doing--filling it--but now he knows that
pulling is the indicated procedure. He does not understand how a tooth
that seemed so open could have deceived him. Nevertheless he will now
pull the tooth.

He pulls her. She does her level best but he pulls her. He harvests
small sections of the gum from time to time and occasionally he stops
long enough to loosen up the roots as far down as your floating ribs.
But he pulls her. He spares no pains to pull that tooth. Or if he spares
any you are not able subsequently to remember what they were. You utter
various loud sounds in a strange and incomprehensible language and he
lays back and braces his knees against your lower jaw, and the tooth
utters the death rattle and begins picking the cover