er he has gashed me casually hither and yen, and sluiced down my
helpless countenance with the carefree abandon of a livery-stable hand
washing off a buggy, and after, as above stated, he has covered up the
traces of his crime with powder, the barber next takes a towel and folds
it over his right hand, as prescribed in the rules and regulations, and
then he dabs me with that towel on various parts of my face nine hundred
and seventy-four--974--separate and distinct times. I know the exact
number of dabs because I have taken the trouble to keep count. I may
be in as great a hurry as you can imagine; I may be but a poor nervous
wreck already, as I am; I may be quivering to be up and away from there,
but he dabs me with his towel--he dabs me until reason totters on her
throne--sometimes just a tiny tot, as the saying goes, or it may be that
the whole cerebral structure is involved--and then when he is apparently
all through the Demoniac Dabber comes back and dabs me one more
fiendish, deliberate and premeditated dab, making nine hundred and
seventy-five dabs in all. He has to do it; it's in the ritual that I and
you and everybody must have that last dab. I wonder how many gibbering
idiots there are in the asylum today whose reason was overthrown by
being dabbed that last farewell dab. I know from my own experience that
I can feel the little dark-green gibbers sloshing round inside of me
every time it happens, and some day my mind will give away altogether
and there'll be a hurry call sent in for the wagon with the lock on the
back door. Yet it is of no avail to cavil or protest; we cannot hope to
escape; we can only sit there in mute and helpless misery and be filled
with a great envy for Mexican hairless dogs.

For quite a spell now we have been speaking of hair on the face; at this
point we revert to hair in its relation to the head. There are some few
among us, mainly professional Southerners and leading men, who retain
the bulk of the hair on their heads through life; but with most of us
the circumstances are different. Your hair goes from you. You don't
seem to notice it at first; then all of a sudden you wake up to the
realization that your head is working its way up through the hair. You
start in then desperately doing things for your hair in the hope of
inducing it to stick round the old place a while longer, but it has
heard the call of the wild and it is on its way. There's no detaining
it. You soak your skull in