ingratitude in return; or else the dye isn't deep
enough, which is even worse. Hair is responsible for such byproducts as
dandruff, barbers, wigs, several comic weeklies, mental anguish, added
expense, Chinese revolutions, and the standard joke about your wife's
using your best razor to open a can of tomatoes with. Hair has been of
aid to Buffalo Bill, Little Lord Fauntleroy, Samson, The Lady Godiva,
Jo-Jo, the Dog-Faced Boy, poets, pianists, some artists and most
mattress makers, but a drawback and a sorrow to Absalom, polar bears in
captivity and the male sex in general.

This assertion goes not only for hair on the head but for hair on the
face. Let us consider for a moment the matter of shaving. If you shave
yourself you excite a barber's contempt, and there is nobody whose
contempt the average man dreads more than a barber's, unless it is
a waiter's. And on the other hand, if you let a barber shave you he
excites not your contempt particularly, but your rage and frequently
your undying hatred. Once in a burst of confidence a barber told me one
of the trade secrets of his profession--he said that among barbers every
face fell into one of three classes, it being either a square, a round
or a squirrel. I know not, reader, whether yours be a square or a
round or a squirrel, but this much I will chance on a venture, sight
unseen--that you have your periods of intense unhappiness when you are
being shaved.

I do not refer so much to the actual process of being shaved. Indeed
there is something restful and soothing to the average male adult in
the feel of a sharp razor being guided over a bristly jowl by a deft
and skillful hand, to the accompaniment of a gentle grating sound and
followed by a sensation of transient silken smoothness. Nor do I refer
to the barber's habit of conversation. After all, a barber is human--he
has to talk to somebody, and it might as well be you. If he didn't have
you to talk to he'd have to talk to another barber, and that would be no
treat to him.

What I do refer to is that which precedes a shave and more especially
that which follows after it. You rush in for a shave. In ten minutes you
have an engagement to be married or something else important, and you
want a shave and you want it quick. Does the barber take cognizance of
the emergency? He does not. Such would be contrary to the ethics of his
calling. Knowing from your own lips that you want a shave and that's
positively all, he never