lotions until your brain softens and your
hat-band gets moldy from the damp, but your hair keeps right on going.

After a while it is practically gone. If only about two-thirds of it is
gone your head looks like a great auk's egg in a snug nest; but if
most of it goes there is something about you that suggests the Glacial
Period, with an icy barren peak rising high above the vegetation line,
where a thin line of heroic strands still cling to the slopes. You are
bald then, a subject fit for the japes of the wicked and universally
coupled in the betting with onions, with hard-boiled eggs and with the
front row of orchestra chairs at a musical show.

At this time of writing baldness is creeping insidiously up each side of
my head. It is executing flank movements from the temples northward, and
some day the two columns will meet and after that I'll be considerably
more of a highbrow than I am now. At present I am craftily combing the
remaining thatch in the middle and smoothing it out nice and flat, so
as to keep those bare spots covered--thinly perhaps, but nevertheless
covered. It is my earnest desire to continue to keep them covered. I
am not a professional beauty; I am not even what you would call a good
amateur beauty; and I want to make what little hair I have go as far as
it conveniently can. But does the barber to whom I repair at frequent
intervals coincide with my desires in this respect? Again I reply he
does not. Every time I go in I speak to him about it. I say to him:
"Woodman, spare that hair, touch not a single strand; in youth it
sheltered me and I'll protect it now." Or in substance that.

He says yes, he will, but he doesn't mean it. He waits until he can
catch me with my guard down. Then he seizes a comb, and using the edge
of his left hand as a bevel and operating his right with a sort of
free-arm Spencerian movement, he roaches my hair up in a scallop effect
on either side, and upon reaching the crest he fights with it and
wrestles with it until he makes it stand erect in a feather-edged
design. I can tell by his expression that he is pleased with this
arrangement. He loves to send his victims forth into the world tufted
like the fretful cockatoo. He likes to see surging waves of hair dash
high on a stern and rockbound head. His sense of the artistic demands
such a result.

What cares he how I feel about it so long as the higher cravings of
his own nature are satisfied? But I resent it--I resent it