-lid. And then he
gives one final heave and breaks the roots away from the lower part of
your spinal column to which they were adhering, and emerges into the
open panting but triumphant, and holds his trophy up for you to look
at. If you didn't know it was your tooth you would take it for an
old-fashioned china cuspidor that had been neglected by the janitor.

It was a tooth that you had been prizing for years, but now you wouldn't
have it as a gracious gift. You are through with that tooth forever. You
never want to see it again.

As for the dentist, he collects the fixed charge for stumpage and
corkage and one thing and another and you come away with a feeling in
the side of your jaw like a vacant lot. Your tongue keeps going over
there to see if it can recognize the old place by the hole where the
foundations used to be. You never realized before what a basement there
was to a tooth.

As you come out you pass a fresh victim going in and you see the dentist
welcome him and then turn to crank up his motor and you hear the canary
tuning up with a new line of v-shaped twitters. And you are glad that he
is the one who is going in and that you are the one who is coming out.

Science tells us that the teeth are the hardest things in the human
composition, which is all very well as far as it goes, but what science
should do is to go on and finish the sentence. It means the hardest to
keep.

HAIR

As I remarked in the preceding chapter of this work, one of the
pleasantest features about being born is that we are born without teeth
and other responsibilities. Teeth, like debts and installment payments,
come along later on. It is the same way with hair.

Born, we are, hairless or comparatively so. We are in a highly
incomplete state at that period of our lives. It takes a fond and doting
parent to detect evidences of an actual human aspect in us. Only the
ears and the mouth appear to be up to the plans and specifications.
There is a mouth which when opened, as it generally is, makes the
rest of the face look like a tire, and there is a pair of ears of
such generous size that only a third one is needed, round at the back
somewhere, to give us the appearance of a loving cup. And we are smocked
and hem-stitched with a million wrinkles apiece, more or less, which
partly accounts for the fact that every newborn infant looks to be about
two hundred years old. And uniformly we have the nice red complexion of
a restaur