string tied round it. It did not seem
possible to me that my cousin could have had a whole shoebox full of
curls, but things had been going pretty badly that afternoon and my
motives had been misjudged and everything, so without any talk I took
the box and hurried home with it. My mother cut the string and my aunt
lifted the lid.

I should prefer again to draw a veil over the scenes that now ensued,
but the necessity of finishing this narrative requires me to state that
it being a Saturday and the head barber being a busy man, he had not
taken time to sort out my cousin's curls from among the flotsam and
jetsam of his establishment, but had just swept up enough off the
floor to make a good assorted boxful. I think the oldest inhabitant had
probably dropped in that day to have himself trimmed up a little round
the edges. I seem to remember a quantity of sandy whiskers shot with
gray. There was enough hair in that box and enough different kinds and
colors of hair and stuff to satisfy almost any taste, you would have
thought, but my mother and aunt were anything but satisfied. On the
contrary, far from it. And yet my cousin's hair was all there, if they
had only been willing to spend a few days sorting it out and separating
it from the other contents.

In this particular instance I was the exception to the rule, that hair
generally gives a boy no great trouble from the time he merges out of
babyhood until he puts on long pants and begins to discern something
strangely and subtly attractive about the sex described by Mr. Kipling
as being the more deadly of the species. During this interim it is a
matter of no moment to a boy whether he goes shaggy or cropped, shorn or
unshorn. At intervals a frugal parent trims him to see if both his ears
are still there, or else a barber does it with more thoroughness, often
recovering small articles of household use that have been mysteriously
missing for months; but in the main he goes along carefree and
unbarbered, not greatly concerned with putting anything in his head or
taking anything off of it.

In due season, though, he reaches the age where adolescent whiskers and
young romance begin to sprout out on him simultaneously--and from that
moment on for the rest of his life his hair is giving him bother, and
plenty of it.

Your hair gives you bother as long as you have it and more bother when
it starts to go. You are always doing something for it and it is always
showing deep-dyed