erhang of whiskers. I tried the old-style razor,
but my shaving ran into big money for court plaster, so I got some
safety razors, several brands of them, determined to keep a
decent-looking lawn. These devices are like mowing machines in that they
have teeth to grip the crop and make it stand straight for the attack of
the knife, but the knife doesn't move in a shuttle like that of the
mowing machine--it is stationary, so that you have an arrangement that
is a combination of mowing machine and road scraper. I think the safety
razors were responsible for most of the blanks in my whisker area. They
dug chunks out of some of the most fertile spots, and as nothing would
grow there, I covered them by the ivy process adopted by bald men, who
train eighteen hairs from back of the left ear diagonally up and across
the cranial arbor and down the front to a point over the right eye,
where the ends are brought up short as if they were rooted near there. I
could say I was not bald. This gave me some satisfaction, but I never
boasted of it in public. There was a streak of porcupine in our family.
This accounted for the trod-grass appearance of my head, even when
prepared carefully for public appearance. It was at its best when it
looked like a meadow of tall timothy that had been walked over by the
cows on a wet day. Curry-combing would not disturb it. Herr Most, Ibsen,
Old Hoss Hoey and I had a common quill-haired ancestor.

There were some other points that fitted me to blush unseen. When I was
fifteen years old and my voice was changing, it struck a peculiar gait.
It ran up and down about six octaves, to the tune of a five-finger
exercise. I talked around town for a few weeks in a surprisingly new
style, that reminded me of a boarder who came up to our place one
summer from New York and undertook to show us how to ride a horse. When
the horse got as fast as a spry walk the boarder would teeter up and
down in the saddle as if he had been practicing on a spring bed and had
kept a chunk of it in each hip pocket for elasticity. George Honkey, our
druggist and censor of public manners, said it was the most insipid
piece of equine pitty-patter he had ever seen on Main Street, and from
the get-up-and-down of it, he guessed it must be the Episcopal ritual
for horseback exercise. My vocal cords, while tuning for my lowly part
in life's orchestra, for a day at a time would seem to stick to a decent
tenor or drop to an impressive bass which