andle-stick, or a----"

"Cow-catcher," I suggested eagerly, and we continued in this ecstatic
duet for some time. Then I asked him what it was all about, and he told
me. He explained the thing eloquently and at length.

"The funny part of it is," he said, "that the thing isn't new at all.
It's been talked about ever since I was a boy, and long before. There is
always a notion that the razor might be done without somehow. But none
of those schemes ever came to anything; and I don't believe myself that
this will."

"Why, as to that," I said, rising slowly from the chair and trying to
put on my coat inside out, "I don't know how it may be in the case of
you and your new shaving. Shaving, with all respect to you, is a trivial
and materialistic thing, and in such things startling inventions are
sometimes made. But what you say reminds me in some dark and dreamy
fashion of something else. I recall it especially when you tell me,
with such evident experience and sincerity, that the new shaving is not
really new. My friend, the human race is always trying this dodge of
making everything entirely easy; but the difficulty which it shifts
off one thing it shifts on to another. If one man has not the toil of
preparing a man's chin, I suppose that some other man has the toil of
preparing something very curious to put on a man's chin. It would be
nice if we could be shaved without troubling anybody. It would be nicer
still if we could go unshaved without annoying anybody--

"'But, O wise friend, chief Barber of the Strand,
Brother, nor you nor I have made the world.'

"Whoever made it, who is wiser, and we hope better than we, made it
under strange limitations, and with painful conditions of pleasure.

"In the first and darkest of its books it is fiercely written that a man
shall not eat his cake and have it; and though all men talked until the
stars were old it would still be true that a man who has lost his razor
could not shave with it. But every now and then men jump up with the new
something or other and say that everything can be had without sacrifice,
that bad is good if you are only enlightened, and that there is no real
difference between being shaved and not being shaved. The difference,
they say, is only a difference of degree; everything is evolutionary
and relative. Shavedness is immanent in man. Every ten-penny nail is
a Potential Razor. The superstitious people of the past (they say)
believed that a lot o