Class 7c >/?J,(jS Copyright}^" f'ff ^ COPYRIGHT DEPOSm Digitized by tlie Internet Archive in 2011 witii funding from The Library of Congress http://www.archive.org/details/cobbsanatomyOOcobb Cobb'^s Anatomy Cobb's Anatomy By Irvin S, Cobb Author of ''Back Home'' Illustrated by Peter Newell New York George H. Doran Company Copyright, 1912, By The Curtis Publishing Company Copyright, 1912, By George H. Doran Company ©CI.A328313 Cobb'^s Anatomy To G. H. L. Who Stood Godfather TO These Contents CobPs Anatomy PREFACE This Space To-Let to Any Reputable Party Desiring a Good Preface Cobb^s Anatomy CONTENTS PAGE I. Tummies 3 II. Teeth ....... 33 III. Hair . . . . . . .69 IV. Hands and Feet . . , .107 Cobb''s Anatomy ILLUSTRATIONS PAGE ''Does he have to take the tailor's word for it that his trousers need pressing?" 5 ,^ "Not in these times when dancing is a cross be- tween a wrestling match, a contortion act and a trip on a roller-coaster." 25 "Cut them with some such mussy thing as the horny part of a nurse's thumb." 37 i/ "And our face folds up on us like a crush hat or a concertina." 41 "^ "Ponto came out . . . and bit him severely in the calf of the leg." 45 "^ "Listening for the footfalls of a dread apparition." 49 V "At this moment the dog trees the woodchuck at the base of that cherished tooth." 53 i^' "It takes a fond and doting parent to detect evi- dences of an actual human aspect in us." 73 "^ "While I stood admiringly by and watched the long yellow curls fall writhing upon the floor.".. 79 ^ "The way she carried on was scandalous and ill- timed." .83 '^ CobPs Anatomy ILL VSTRATIONS— Continued PAGE "Every face fell into one of three classes, it being either a square, a round or a squirrel." 89 "When my back is turned he grabs up his powder ^ swab and makes a quick swoop upon me.'^ 97 "There'd be twice as many hands to wash when company was coming to dinner." iii "The presence of a soiled rag round a finger gives to a boy's hand a touch of distinctiveness." 1 15 "These gifted mortals are not common." ii9 "We don't know what to do with our hands?**. . . 123 "I don't think IVe seen a jumpman's nails in such a state for ever so long." 129 ^ Cobb''s Anatomy TUMMIES Cobb's Anatomy Tummies DR. WOODS HUTCHINSON says that fat people are happier than other people. How does Dr. Woods Hutchinson know? Did he ever have to leave the two top buttons of his vest unfastened on account of his extra chins? Has the pressure from within against the waistband where the watchfob is located ever been so great in his case that he had partially to undress himself to find out what time it was? Does he have to take the tailor's word for it that his trousers need pressing? He does not. And that sort of a remark is only what might be expected from any person upward of seven feet tall and weigh- ing about ninety-eight pounds with his heavy underwear on. I shall freely take Dr. Woods Hutchinson's statements on the 4 Cobb^'s Anatomy joys and ills of the thin. But when he un- dertakes to tell me that fat people are hap- pier than thin people, it is only hearsay evidence with him and I decline to accept his statements unchallenged. He is going outside of his class. He is, as you might say, no more than an innocent bystander. Whereas I am a qualified authority. I will admit that at one stage of my life, I regarded fleshiness as a desirable asset. The incident came about in this way. There was a circus showing in our town and a number of us proposed to attend it. It was one of those one-ring, ten-cent circuses that used to go about over the country, and it is my present recollection that all of us had funds laid by sufficient to buy tickets; but if we could procure admission in the regu- lar way we felt it would be a sinful waste of money to pay our way in. With this idea in mind we went scouting round back of the main tent to a compara- tively secluded spot, and there we found a place where the canvas side-wall lifted clear of the earth for a matter of four or five inches. We held an informal caucus to C-^^^ "DOES HE HAVE TO TAKE THE TAILOR'S ^VORD FOR IT THAT HIS TROUSERS NEED PRESSING ? " Tummies 7 decide who should go first. The honor lay between two of us — between the present writer, who was reasonably skinny, and an- other boy, named Thompson, who was even skinnier. He won, as the saying is, on form. It was decided by practically a unanimous vote, he alone dissenting, that he should crawl under and see how the land lay inside. If everything was all right he would make it known by certain signals and we would then follow, one by one. Two of us lifted the canvas very gently and this Thompson boy started to wriggle under. He was about halfway in when — zip ! — like a flash he bodily vanished. He was gone, leaving only the marks where his toes had gouged the soil. Startled, we looked at one another. There was something pe- culiar about this. Here was a boy who had started into a circus tent in a circumspect, indeed, a highly cautious manner, and then finished the trip with undue and sudden precipitancy. It was more than peculiar — it bordered upon the uncanny. It was sin- ister. Without a word having been spoken we decided to go away from there. 8 Cobb^s Anatomy Wearing expressions of intense uncon- cern and sterling innocence upon our young faces we did go away from there and drifted back in the general direction of the main entrance. We arrived just in time to meet our young friend coming out. He came hurriedly, using his hands and his feet both, his feet for traveling and his hands for rub- bing purposes. Immediately behind him was a large, coarse man using language that stamped him as a man who had outgrown the spirit of youth and was preeminently out of touch with the ideals and aims of boy- hood. At that period it seemed to me and to the Thompson boy, who was moved to speak feelingly on the subject, and in fact to all of us, that excessive slimness might have its drawbacks. Since that time several of us have had occasion to change our minds. With the passage of years we have fleshened up, and now we know better. The last time I saw the Thompson boy he was known as Excess-Baggage Thompson. His figure \\\ profile suggested a man carrying a roll-top desk in his arms and his face looked like a Tummies face that had refused to jell and was about to run down on his clothes. He spoke long- ingly of the days of his youth and wondered if the shape of his knees had changed much since the last time he saw them. Yes sir, no matter what Doctor Hutch- inson says, I contend that the slim man has all the best of it in this world. The fat man is the universal goat; he is humanity's stand- ing joke. Stomachs are the curse of our modern civilization. When a man gets a stomach his troubles begin. If you doubt this ask any fat man — I started to say ask any fat woman, too. Only there aren't any fat women to speak of. There are women who are plump and will admit it; there are even women who are inclined to be stout. But outside of dime museums there are no fat women. But there are plenty of fat men. Ask one of them. Ask any one of them. Ask me. This thing of acquiring a tummy steals on one insidiously, like a thief in the night. You notice that you are plumping out a trifle and for the time being you feel a sort of small personal satisfaction in it. Your 10 Cobb^s Anatomy shirts fit you better. You love the slight strain upon the buttonholes. You admire the pleasant plunking sound suggestive of ripe watermelons when you pat yourself. Then a day comes when the persuasive odor of mothballs fills the autumnal air and everybody at the barber shop is having the back of his neck shaved also, thus betoken- ing awakened social activities, and when evening is at hand you take the dress-suit, which fitted you so well, out of the closet where it has been hanging and undertake to back yourself into it. You are pained to learn that it is about three sizes too small. At first you are inclined to blame the suit for shrinking, but second thought convinces you that the fault lies elsewhere. It is you that have swollen, not the suit that has shrunk. The buttons that should adorn the front of the coat are now plainly visible from the rear. You buy another dress-suit and next fall you have out-grown that one too. You pant like a lizard when you run to catch a car. You cross your legs and have to hold the crossed one on with both hands to keep your Tummies 11 stomach from shoving it off in space. After- awhile you quit crossing them and are con- tent with dawdling yourself on your own lap. You are fat! Dog-gone it — you are fat! You are up against it and it is up against you, which is worse. You are something for people to laugh at. You are also expected to laugh. It is all right for a thin man to be grouchy; people will say the poor crea- ture has dyspepsia and should be humored along. But a fat man with a grouch is inex- cusable in any company — there is so much of him to be grouchy. He constitutes a wave of discontent and a period of general depression.' He is not expected to be ro- mantic and sentimental either. It is all right for a giraffe to be sentimental, but not a hippopotamus. If you doubt me consult any set of natural history pictures. The giraffe is shown with his long and sinuous neck entwined in fond embrace about the neck of his mate; but the amphibious, blood-sweating hippo is depicted as spout- ing and wallowing, morose and misan- thropic, in a mud puddle off by himself. 12 Cobb^s Anatomy In passing I may say that I regard this com- parison as a particularly apt one, because I know of no living creature so truly amphib- ious in hot weather as an open-pored fat m.an, unless it is a hippopotamus. Oh how true is the saying that nobody loves a fat man! When fat comes up on the front porch love jumps out of the third- story window. Love in a cottage? Yes. Love in a rendering plant? No. A fat man's heart is supposed to lie so far inland that the softer emotions cannot reach it at all. Yet the fattest are the truest, if you did but know it, and also they are the tenderest;X and a man with a double chin rarely leads a double life. For one thing, it requires ; too much moving round. A fat man cannot wear the clothes he would like to wear. As a race, fat men are fond of bright and cheerful colors; but no fat man can indulge his innocent desires in this direction without grieving his family and friends and exciting the derisive laugh- ter of the unthinking. If he puts on a fancy- flowered vest, they'll say he looks like a Hanging Garden of Babylon. And yet he Tummies 13 has a figure just made for showing ofif a fancy-flowered vest to best effect. He may favor something in light checks for his spring suit; but if he ventures abroad in a checked suit, ribald strangers will look at him meaningly and remark to one another that the center of population appears to be shifting again. It has been my observation that fat men are instinctively drawn to short tan overcoats for the early fall. But a fat man in a short tan overcoat, strolling up the avenue of a sunny afternoon, will be con- stantly overhearing persons behind him wondering why they didn't wait until night to move the bank vault. That irks him sore; but if he turns round to reproach them he is liable to shove an old lady or a poor blind man ofif the sidewalk, and then, like as not, some gamin will sing out: ^^HuUy gee, Chimmy, wot's become of the rest of the parade? 'Ere's the bass drum goin' home all by itself." I've known of just such remarks being made and I assure you they cut a sensitive soul to the core. Not for the fat man are the snappy clothes for varsity men and the 14 Cobb^s Anatomy patterns called by the tailors confined because that is what they should be, but aren't. Not for him the silken shirt with the broad stripes. Shirts with stripes that were meant to run vertically but are caused to run horizontally, by reasons over which the wearer has no control, remind others of the awning over an Italian grocery. So the fat man must stick to sober navy blues and depressing blacks and melancholy grays. He is advised that he should wear his even- ing clothes whenever possible, because black and white lines are more becoming to him. But even in evening clothes, that wide ex- panse of glazed shirt and those white enamel studs will put the onlookers in mind of the front end of a dairy lunch — or so I have been cruelly told. When planning public utilities, who thinks of a fat man? There never was a hansom cab made that would hold a fat man comfortably unless he left the doors open, and that makes him feel undressed. There never was an orchestra seat in a the- ater that would contain all of him at the same time— he churns up and sloshes out Tummies 15 over the sides. Apartment houses and ele- vators and hotel towels are all constructed upon the idea that the world is populated by stock-size people with those double-A- last shapes. Take a Pullman car, for instance. One of the saddest sights known is that of a fat man trying to undress on one of those closet shelves called upper berths without getting hopelessly entangled in the ham- mock or committing suicide by hanging himself with his own suspenders. And after that, the next most distressing sight is the same fat man after he has undressed and is lying there, spouting like a sperm-whale and overflowing his reservation like a crock of salt-rising dough in a warm kitchen, and wondering how he can turn over without bulging the side of the car and maybe caus- ing a wreck. Ah me, those dark green cur- tains with the overcoat buttons on them hide many a distressful spectacle from the travel- ing public! If a fat man undertakes to reduce nobody sympathizes with him. A thin man trying to fatten up so he won't fall all the way 16 Cobb'^s Anatomy through his trousers when he draws 'em on in the morning is an object of sympathy and of admiration, and people come from miles round and give him advice about how to do it. But suppose a fat man wants to train down to a point where, when he goes into a telephone booth and says ^^Ninety-four Broad," the spectators will know he is try- ing to get a number and not telling his tailor what his waist measure is. Is he greeted with sympathetic under- standing? He is not. He is greeted with derision and people stand round and gloat at him. The authorities recommend health exercises, but health exercises are almost in- variably undignified in effect and wearing besides. Who wants to greet the dewy morn by lying flat on his back and lifting his feet fifty times? What kind of a way is that to greet the dewy morn anyhow? And bending over with the knees stiff and touch- ing the tips of the toes with the tips of the fingers — that's no employment for a grown man with a family to support and a position to maintain in society. Besides which it can- not be done. I make the statement unequiv- Tummies 1 7 ocally and without fear of successful contra- diction that it cannot be done. And if it could be done — which as I say it can't — there would be no real pleasure in touching a set of toes that one has known of only by common rumor for years. Those toes are the same as strangers to you — you knew they were in the neighborhood, of course, but you haven't been intimate with them. Maybe you try dieting, which is contrary to nature. Nature intended that a fat man should eat heartily, else why should she endow him with the capacity and the accommodations. Starving in the midst of plenty is not for him who has plenty of midst. Nature meant that a fat man should have an appetite and that he should gratify it at regular intervals — meant that he should feel like the Grand Caiion before dinner and like the Royal Gorge afterward. Anyhow, dieting for a fat man consists in not eating anything that's fit to eat. The specialist merely tells him to eat what a horse would eat and has the nerve to charge him for what he could have found out for himself at any livery stable. Of course he 18 Cobb^s Anatomy might bant in the same way that a woman bants. You know how a woman bants. She begins the day very resolutely, and if you are her husband you want to avoid irritat- ing her or upsetting her, because hell hath no fury like a woman banting. For break- fast she takes a swallow of lukewarm water and half of a soda cracker. For luncheon she takes the other half of the cracker and leaves off the water. For dinner she orders everything on the menu except the date and the name of the proprietor. She does this in order to give her strength to go on with the treatment. No fat man would diet that way; but no matter which way he does diet it doesn't do him any good. Health exercises only make him muscle-sore and bring on what the Harvard ball team call the Charles W. Horse; while banting results in attacks of those kindred complaints — the MoUie K. Grubbs and the Fan J. Todds. Walking is sometimes recommended and the example of the camel is pointed out, the camel being a creature that can walk for days and days. But, as has been said by Tummies 19 some thinking person, who in thunder wants to be a camel? The subject of horse- back riding is also brought up frequently in this connection. It is one of the common- est delusions among fat men that horseback riding will bring them down and make them sylphlike and willowy. I have sev- eral fat men among my lists of acquaint- ances who labor under this fallacy. None of them was ever a natural-born horseback rider; none of them ever will be. I like to go out of a bright morning and take a comfortable seat on a park bench — one park bench is plenty roomy enough if no- body else is using it — and sit there and watch these unhappy persons passing single file along the bridle-path. I sit there and gloat until by rights I ought to be required to take out a gloater's license. Mind you, I have no prejudice against horseback riding as such. Horseback rid- ing is all right for mounted policemen and Colonel W. F. Cody and members of the Stickney family and the party who used to play Mazeppa in the sterling drama of that name. That is how those persons make their 20 Cobb^s Anatomy living. They are suited for it and accli- mated to it. It is also all right for eques- trian statues of generals in the Civil War. But it is not a fit employment for a fat man, and especially for a fat man who insists on trying to ride a hard-trotting horse English style, which really isn't riding at all when you come right down to cases, but an out- door cure for neurasthenia invented, I take it, by a British subject who was nervous himself and hated to stay long in one place. So, as I was saying, I sit there on my com- fortable park bench and watch those friends of mine bouncing by, each wearing on his face that set expression which is seen also on the faces of some men while waltzing, and on the faces of most women when en- tertaining their relatives by marriage. I have one friend who is addicted to this form of punishment in a violent, not to say a ma- lignant form. He uses for his purpose a tall and self-willed horse of the Tudor per- iod — a horse with those high dormer effects and a sloping mansard. This horse must have been raised, I think, in the knockabout song-and-dance business. Every time he Tummies 21 hears music or thinks he hears it he stops and vamps with his feet. When he does this my friend bends forward and clutches him round the neck tightly. I think he is trying to whisper in the horse's ear and beg him in Heaven's name to forbear; but what he looks like is Santa Claus with a clean shave, sitting on the combing of a very steep house with his feet hanging over the eaves, peeking down the chimney to see if the children are asleep yet. When that horse dies he will still have finger marks on his throat and the authorities will sus- pect foul play probably. Once I tried it myself. I was induced to scale the heights of a horse that was built somewhat along the general idea of the Andes Mountains, only more rugged and steeper nearing the crest. From the ground he looked to be not more than sixteen hands high, but as soon as I was up on top of him I immediately discerned that it was not six- teen hands — it was sixteen miles. What I had taken for the horse's blaze face was a snow-capped peak. Miss Anna Peck might have felt at home up there, because she has 22 CobPs Anatomy had the experience and is used to that sort of thing, but I am no mountain climber myself. Before I could make any move to descend to the lower and less rarified altitudes the horse began executing a few fancy steps, and he started traveling sidewise with a kind of a slanting bias movement that was extremely disconcerting, not to say alarm- ing, instead of proceeding straight ahead as a regular horse would. I clung there astrad- dle of his ridge pole, with my fingers twined in his mane, trying to anticipate where he would be next, in order to be there to meet him if possible; and I resolved right then that, if Providence in His wis- dom so willed it that I should get down from up there alive, I would never do so again. However, I did not express these longings in words — not at that time. At that time there were only two words in the English language which seemed to come to me. One of them was ^Whoa" and the other was ^^Ouch," and I spoke them alter- nately with such rapidity that they merged into the compound word ^^Whouch," which Tummies 23 is a very expressive word and one that I would freely recommend to others who may be situated as I was. At that moment, of all the places in the world that I could think of — and I could think of a great many because the events of my past life were rapidly flashing past me — as is customary, I am told, in other cases of grave peril, such as drowning — I say of all the places in the world there were just two where I least desired to be — one was up on top of that horse and the other was down under him. But it seemed to be a choice of the two evils, and so I chose the lesser and got under him. I did this by a simple expedient that occurred to me at the mo- ment. I fell off. I was tramped on con- siderably, and the earth proved to be harder than it looked when viewed from an ap- proximate height of sixteen miles up, but I lived and breathed — or at least I breathed after a time had clasped — and I was sat- isfied. And so, having gone through this experience myself, I am in position to ap- preciate what any other man of my general build is going through as I see him bobbing 24 Cobb^s Anatomy by — the poor martyr, sacrificing himself as a burnt offering, or anyway a blistered one — on the high altar of a Gothic ruin of a horse. And, besides, I know that riding a horse doesn't reduce a fat man. It merely reduces the horse. So it goes — the fat man is always up against it. His figure is half-masted in re- gretful memory of the proportions he had once, and he is made to mourn. Most sports and many gainful pursuits are closed against him. He cannot play lawn tennis, or, at least according to my observation, he can- not play lawn tennis oftener than once in two weeks. In between games he limps round, stifif as a hat tree and sore as a mashed thumb. Time was when he might mingle in the mystic mazes of the waltz, tripping the light fantastic toe or stubbing it, as the case may be. But that was m the days of the old-fashioned square dance, which was the fat man's friend among dances, and also of the old-fashioned two-step, and not in these times when dancing is a cross between a wrestling match, a contortion act and a trip on a roller-coaster, and is either named "NOT IN THESE TIMES WHEN DANCING IS A CROSS BETWEEN A WRESTLING MATCH, A CONTORTION ACT AND A TRIP ON A ROLLER-COASTER" Tummies 21 for an animal, like the Bunny Hug and the Tarantula Glide, or for a town, like the Mobile Mop-Up, and the Far Rockaway Rock and the South Bend Bend. His friends would interfere — or the authorities would. He can go in swimming, it is true; but if he turns over and floats, people yell out that somebody has set the life raft adrift; and if he basks at the water's edge, boats will come in and try to dock along- side him; and if he takes a sun bath on the beach and sunburns, there's so everlasting much of him to be sunburned that he prac- tically amounts to a conflagration. He can't shoot rapids, craps or big game with any degree of comfort; nor play billiards. He can't get close enough to the table to make the shots, and he puts all the English on himself and none of it on the cue ball. Consider the gainful pursuits. Think how many of them are denied to the man who may have energy and ability but is shut out because there are a few extra ter- races on his front lawn. A fat man cannot be a leading man in a play. Nobody desires a fat hero for a novel. A fat man cannot go 28 Cobb^s Anatomy in for aeroplaning. He cannot be a wire- walker or a successful walker of any of the other recognized brands — track, cake, sleep or floor. He doesn't make a popular waiter. Nobody wants a fat waiter on a hot day. True, you may make him bring your order under covered dishes, but even so, there is still that suggestion of rain on a tin roof that is distasteful to so many. So I repeat that fat people are always get- ting the worst of it, and I say again, of all the ills that flesh is heir to, the worst is the flesh itself. As the poet says — ^^The world, the flesh and the devil" — and there you have it in a sentence — the flesh in between, catch- ing the devil on one side and the jeers of the world on the other. I don't care what Dr. Woods Hutchinson or any other thin man says! I contend that history is studded with instances of prominent persons who lost out because they got fat. Take Cleopatra now, the lady to whom Marc Antony said: ^^I am dying, Egypt, dying," and then re- frained from doing so for about nineteen more stanzas. Cleo or Pat — she was known by both names, I hear — did fairly well as a Tummies 29 queen, as a coquette and as a promoter of excursions on the river — until she fleshened up. Then she flivvered. Doctor Johnson was a fat man and he suffered from prickly heat, and from Boswell, and from the fact that he couldn't eat without spilling most of the gravy on his second mezzanine land- ing. As a thin and spindly stripling Na- poleon altered the map of Europe and stood many nations on their heads. It was after he had grown fat and pursy that he landed on St. Helena and spent his last days on a bar- ren rock, with his arms folded, posing for steel engravings. Nero was fat, and he had a lot of hard luck in keeping his relatives — they were almost constantly dying on him — and he finally had to stab himself with one of those painful-looking old Roman two- handed swords, lest something really seri- ous befall him. Falstaff was fat, and he lost the favor of kings in the last act. Coming down to our own day and turning to a point no farther away than the White House at Washington — but have we not enough ex- amples without becoming personal? Yes, I know Julius Caesar said: "Let me 30 Cobb^s Anatomy have men about me that are fat." But you bet it wasn't in the heated period when J, Caesar said that! Cobb''s Anatomy TEETH Cobb's Anatomy Teeth ONE OF THE MOST pleasant fea- tures about being born, as I con- ceive it, is that we are born without teeth. I believe there have been a few ex- ceptions to this rule — Richard the Third, according to the accounts, came into the world equipped with all his teeth and a per- fectly miserable disposition; and once in a while, especially during Roosevelt years, when the Colonel's picture is hanging on the walls of so many American homes, we read in the paper that a baby has just been born somewhere with a full set, and even, as in the case of the infant son of a former member of the Rough Riders, with nose glasses and a close-cropped mustache. This, however, may have been a pardonable ex- aggeration of the real facts. As I recall now, it was reported in a dispatch to the 36 Cobb^s Anatomy New York Tribune from Lover's Leap, Iowa, during the presidential campaign eight years ago. In the main, though, we are born with- out teeth. We are born without a number of things — clothes for example— although Anthony Comstock is said to be pushing a law requiring all children to be born with overalls on; but teeth is the subject which we are now discussing. This absence of teeth tends to give the very young of our species the appearance in the face of an old fashioned buckskin purse with the draw string broken, but be that as it may, we are generally fairly well content with life until the teeth begin to come. First there are the milk teeth. Right there our troubles start. To use the term commonly in use, we cut them, although as a matter of fact, they cut us — cut them with the aid of some such mussy thing as a tooth- ing ring or the horny part of the nurse's thumb, or the reverse side of a spoon — cut them at the cost of infinite suffering, not only for ourselves but for everybody else in the vicinity. And about the time we get *«**^ "CUT THEM ^\^ITH SOME SUCH MUSSY THING AS- THE HORNY PART OF A NURSE'S THUMB" Teeth 39 the last one in we begin to lose the first one out. They go one at a time, by falling out, or by being yanked out, or by coming out of their own accord when we eat molasses tafify. They were merely what you might call our Entered Apprentice teeth. We go in now for the full thirty-two degrees — one degree for each tooth and thirty-two teeth to a set. By arduous and painful processes, stretching over a period of years, we get our regular teeth — the others were only volunteers — concluding with the wisdom teeth, as so called, but it is a misnomer, be- cause there never is room for them and they have to stand up in the back row and they usually arrive with holes in them, and if we really possessed any wisdom we would fig- ure out some way of abolishing them alto- gether. They come late and crowd their way in and push the other teeth out of line and so we go about for months with the top of our mouths filled with braces and wires and things, so that when we breathe hard we sob and croon inside of ourselves like an Aeolean harp. But in any event we get them all and no 40- Cobb^s Anatomy sooner do we get them than we begin to lose them. They develop cavities and aches and extra roots and we spend a good part of our lives and most of our substance with the dentist. Nevertheless, in spite of all we can do and all he can do, we keep on losing them. And after awhile, they are all gone and our face folds up on us like a crush hat or a concertina and from our brow to our chin we don't look much more than a third as long as we used to look. We dis- like this folded-up appearance naturally — who wouldn't? And we get tired of living on spoon victuals and the memory of past beef-steaks. So we go and get some false ones made. They have to be made to order; there appears to be no market for custom made teeth; you never see any hand-me- down teeth advertised, guaranteed to fit any face and withstand a damp climate. Get- ting them made to order is a long and un- happy process and I will pass over it briefly. Having got them, we find that they do not fit us or that we do not fit them, which comes to the same thing. The dentist makes them fit by altering us some and the teeth AND OUR FACE FOLDS UP ON US LIKE A CRUSH HAT OR A CONCERTINA" Teeth 43 some, and after some months they quit feel- ing as though they didn't belong to us but had been borrowed temporarily from some- body's loan collection of ceramics. But just about the time they are becom- ing acclimated and we are getting used to them, the interior of our mouth for private reasons best known to itself changes around materially and we either have to go back and start all over and go through the whole thing again, or else haply we die and pass on to the bourne from which no traveller re- turneth either with his teeth or without them. If Shakespeare had only thought of it — and he did think of a number of things from time to time — he might have divided his Seven Ages of Man much better by making them the Seven Ages of Teeth as follows: First age — no tooth; second age — milk teeth; third age — losing 'em; fourth age — getting more teeth; fifth age — losing 'em; sixth age — getting false teeth and find- ing they aren't satisfactory; seventh age — toothless again. I knew a man once who was a gunsmith and lost all his teeth at a comparatively 44 Cobb^s Anatomy early age. He went along that way for years. He had to eschew the tenderloin for the reason that he couldn't chew it, and he had to cut out hickory nut cake and corn on the ear and such things. But there is noth- ing about the art of gunsmithing which seems to call for teeth, so he got along very well, living in a little house with the wife of his bosom and a faithful housedog named Ponto. But when he was past sixty he went and got himself some teeth from the dentist. He did this without saying anything about it at home; he was treasuring it up for a surprise. The corner stone was laid in May and the scaffolding was all up by July and in August the new teeth were dedicated with suitable ceremonies. They altered his appearance materially. His nose and chin which had been on terms of intimacy now rubbed each other a last fond good-bye and his face lost that accor- dian-pleated look and straightened out and became about six or seven inches longer from top to bottom. He now had a sort of determined aspect like the iron jawed lady in a circus, whereas before his face had the "PONTO CAME OUT - - - AND BIT HIM SEVERELY IN THE CALF OF THE LEG" Teeth 41 appearance of being folded over and wad- ded down inside of his neck band, so his hat could rest comfortably on his collar. He knew he was altered, but he didn't realize how much he was altered until he went home that evening and walked proudly in the front gate. His wife who was timid about strangers, slammed the door right in his face and faithful Ponto came out from under the porch steps and bit him severely in the calf of the leg. There was only one consolation in it for him — for the first time in a long number of years he was in position to bite back. And that's how it is with teeth — with your teeth let us say — for right here I'm going to drop the personal pronoun and speak of them as your teeth from now on. If anybody has to sufifer it might as well be you and not me; I expect to be busy telling about it. As I started to say awhile ago, you — remember it's you from this point — you get your regular teeth and they start right in giving you trouble. Every little while one of them bursts from its cell with a hor- rible yell and in the lulls between pangs you 48 Cobb^s Anatomy go forth among men with the haunted look in your eye of one who is listening for the footfalls of a dread apparition, and one- half of your head is pufifed out of plumb as though you were engaged in the whimsical idea of holding an egg plant in the side of your jaw. A kind friend meets you, and, speaking with that high courage and that lofty spirit of sacrifice which a kind friend always exhibits when it's your tooth that is kicking up the rumpus and not his, he tells you you ought to have something done for it right away. You know that as well as he does, but you hate to have the subject brought up. It's your toothache anyhow. It originated with you. You are its proud parent but not so awfully proud at that. Mother and child doing as well as could be expected, but not expected to do very well. But these friends of yours keep on shoving their free advice on you and the tooth keeps on getting worse and worse until the pain spreads all through the First Ward and finally you grab your resolution in both hands to keep it from leaking out between your fingers and you go to the dentist's. "LISTENING FOR THE FOOTFALLS OF A DREAD APPARITION" Teeth 51 This happens so many times that aftei awhile you lose count and so would the den- tist, if he didn't write your name down every time in his little red book with pleas- ingly large amounts entered opposite to it. It seems to you that you are always doing something for your teeth? You have them pulled and pushed and shoved and filled and unfilled and refilled and excavated and blasted and sculptured and scroll-sawed and a lot of other things that you wouldn't think could be done legally without a build- ing permit. As time passes on, the inside of your once well-filled and commodious head becomes but little more than a recent site. Your vaults have been blown and most of your contents abstracted by Amal- gam Mike and Dental Slim, the Demon Yeggmen of the Human Face. You are merely the scattered clews left behind for the authorities to work on; you are the. faint traces of the fiendish crime. You are the point marked X. But all along there is generally one tooth that has behaved herself like a lady. Other teeth may have betrayed your confidence 52 Cobb'^s Anatomy but Old Faithful has hung on, attending to business, asking only for standing room and kind treatment. The others you may view with alarm, but to this tooth you can point with pride. But have a care — she is de- ceiving you. Some night you go to bed and have a dream. In your dream it seems to you that a fox terrier is chasing a woodchuck around and around the inside of your head. In that tangled sort of fashion peculiar to dreams your sympathy seems to go out first to the fox terrier and then to the woodchuck as they circle about nimbly, leaping from your tonsils to your larynx and then up over the rafters in the roof of your mouth and down again and pattering over the sub-maxillary from side to side. But about then you wake up with a violent start and decide that any sympathy you may have in stock should be reserved for personal use exclusively, be- cause at this moment the dog trees the woodchuck at the base of that cherished tooth of yours and starts to dig him out. He is a determined dog and very active, AT THIS MOMENT THE DOG TREES THE WOODCHUCK AT THE BASE OF THAT CHERISHED TOOTH" Teeth 55 but he needs a manicure. You are struck by that fact almost immediately. Uttering some of those trite and common- place remarks that are customary for use under such circumstances and yet are so futile to express one's real sentiments, you arise and undertake to pacify the infuriated creature with household remedies. You try to lure him away with a wad of medicated cotton stuck on the end of a parlor match. But arnica is evidently an acquired taste with him. He doesn't seem to care for it any more than you do. You begin to dress, using one hand to put your clothes on with and the other to hold the top of your head on. At this important juncture, the dog tears down the last remaining partitions and nails the woodchuck. The woodchuck is game — say what you will about the habits and customs of the woodchuck you have to hand it to him there — he's game as a lion. He fights back desperately. Intense excite- ment reigns throughout the vicinity. While the struggle wages you get your clothes on and wait for daylight to come, which it does in from eight to ten weeks. Norway is 56 Cobb^s Anatomy not the only place where the nights are six months long. There is nobody waiting at the dentist's when you get there, it being early. You are willing to wait. At a barber shop it may be different but at a dentist's you are always willing to wait, like a gentleman. But the sinewy young man who is sitting in the front parlor reading the Hammer Throw- er's Gazette, welcomes you with a false air of gaiety entirely out of keeping with the circumstances and invites you to step right in. He tells you that you are next. This is wrong — if you were next you would turn and flee like a deer. Not being next, you enter. Right from the start you seem to take a dislike to this young man. You catch him spitting in his hands and hitching his sleeves up as you are hanging up your hat. Besides he is too robust for a dentist. With those shoulders he ought to be a boiler maker or a safe mover or something of that sort. You resolve inwardly that next time you go to a dentist you are going to one of a more lady-like bearing and gentler demeanor. It seems a brutal thing Teeth 57 that a big strong man should waste his years in a dental establishment when the world is clamoring for strong men to do the heavy lifting jobs. But before you can say any- thing, this muscular athlete has laid violent hands on your palpitating form and wad- ded it abruptly into the hideous embraces of a red plush chair, which looks something like the one they use up at Sing Sing, only it's done more quickly up there and with less suffering on the part of the condemned. On one side of you you behold quite a dis- play of open plumbing and on the other side a tasty exhibit of small steel tools of assorted sizes. No matter which way your gaze may stray you'll be seeing something attractive. You also take notice of an electric motor about large enough, you would say, to run a trolley car, which is purring nearby in a sinister and forbidding way. They are con- stantly making these little improvements in the dental profession. I have heard that fifty years ago a dentist traveled about over the country from place to place, sometimes pulling a tooth and sometimes breaking a 58 Cobb^s Anatomy colt. He practiced his art with an outfit con- sisting of two pairs of iron forceps — one pair being saber-toothed while the other pair was merely saw-fretted — and he gave a man the same kind of treatment he gave a horse, only he tied the horse's legs first. But now elec- tricity is in general use and no dentist's establishment is complete without a dyna- mo attachment which makes a crooning sound when in operation and provides in- strumental accompaniment to the song of the official canary. I know why a barber in a country town is always learning to play on the guitar and I know why a man with an emotional Adam's apple always wears an open front collar. I know these things, but am debar- red from telling them by reason of a solemn oath. But I have not yet been able to dis- cover why every dentist keeps a canary in his office. Nor do I know why it is, just as you settle your neck back on a head rest that's every bit as comfortable as an anvil, and just as a dentist climbs into you as far as the arm pits and begins probing at the bottom of a tooth which has roots extending Teeth 59 back behind your ears, like an old-fash- ioned pair of spectacles, that the canary bird should wipe his nose on a cuttle bone and dash into a melodious outburst of two hundred thousand twitters, all of them being twitters of the same size, shape, and color. For that matter, I don't even know what kind of an animal a cuttle is, although I should say from the shape of his bone as used by the canary instead of a pocket handkerchief, that he is circular and flat and stands on edge only with the utmost difficulty. If you will pardon my tempor- ary digressions into the realm of natural history, we will now return to the main sub- ject, which was your tooth. The moment the muscular young man starts up his motor and gives the canary its music cue and begins pawing over his tool collection to pick out a good sharp one, you recover. All of a sudden you feel fine, and so does the tooth. Neither one of you ever felt better. The fox terrier must have killed the woodchuck and then committed suicide. You are about to mention this double tragedy and beg the young man's 60 Cobb^s Anatomy pardon for causing him any trouble and ex- cuse yourself and go away, but just then he quits feeling of his biceps and suddenly siezes you by your features and undoes them. If you are where you can catch a glimpse of yourself in a mirror you will immediately note how much the human face divine can be made to look like an old-fashioned red brick Colonial fire place. There are likely to be several things you would like to talk about. You are full of thoughts seeking utterance. For one thing you want to tell him you don't think the brand of soap he uses on his hands is going to agree with you at all. You probably don't care personally for the way your bar- ber's thumb tastes either, but a barber's thumb is Peaches Melba alongside of a dentist's. Before you can say anything though he discovers a cavity or orifice of some sort in the base of your tooth. It seems to give him pleasure. Filled with intense gratification by this discovery and fired moreover by the impetuous ardor of the chase, he grabs up a crochet needle with a red hot stinger on the end of it and jabs it Teeth 61 down your tooth to a point about opposite where your suspenders fork in the back. You have words with him then^ or at least you start to have words with him, but he puts his knee in your chest and tells you that it really doesn't hurt at all, but is only your imagination, and utters other soothing remarks of that general nature. He then exchanges the crochet needle for a kind of an instrument with a burr on the end of it^ This instrument first came into use at the time of the Spanish Inquisition but has since been greatly improved on and brought right up to date. He takes this handy little utensil and proceeds to stir up your imagin- ation some more. You again try to say something, speaking in a muffled tone, but he is not listening. He is calling to a broth- er assassin in the adjoining room to come and see a magnificent example of a prime old-vatted triple X exposed nerve. So the Second Grave Digger rests his tools against the palate of his victim and comes in. As nearly as you can gather from hearsay evidence, you not being an eye witness your- self, one of them harpoons the nerve just 62 Cobb^s Anatomy back of the gills with a nutpick — remember please it is your nerve that they are taking all these liberties with — and pulls it out of its retreat and the other man takes a tack hammer and tries to beat its brains out. Any time he misses the nerve he hits you, so his average is still a thousand, and it is fine practice for him. A pleasant time is had by everybody present except you and the nerve. The nerve wraps its hind legs around your breastbone and hangs on des- perately. You perspire freely and make noises like a drunken Zulu trying to sing a Swedish folk song while holding a spoonful of hot mush in his mouth. In time becoming wearied even of these congenial diversions and tiring of the shop talk that has been going on, the second den- tist returns to his original prey and the party who has you in charge tries a new ex- periment. He arms himself with a kind of an automatic hammering machine, some- what similar to the steam riveter used in constructing steel office buildings, except that this one is more compact and can de- liver about eighty-five more blows to the Teeth 63 second. Thus equipped, he descends far below your high water mark and engages in aquatic sports and pastimes for a consider- able period of time. It seems to you that you never saw a man who could go down and stay down as long as this young man can. You begin to feel that you misjudged his real vocation in life when you decided that he ought to be a boiler maker. You know that he was intended for pearl fish- ing. He's a natural born deep sea diver. He doesn't even have to come up to breathe, but stays below, knee deep in your tide wash, merrily knocking chunks off your lowermost coral reefs with his little steam riveter and having a perfectly lovely time. You are overflowing copiously and you wish he would take the time to stop and bail you out. You abhor the idea of being drowned as an inside job. But no, he keeps right on and along about here it is custom- ary for you to swoon away. On recovering, you observe that he has changed his mind again. He is now going in for amateur theatricals and is using you for a theatre. First thoughtfully drap- 64 Cobb^s Anatomy ing a little rubber drop curtain across your proscenium arch to keep you from seeing what is going on behind your own scenes, he is setting the stage for the thrilling saw- mill scene in Blue Jeans. You can dis- tinctly feel the circular saw at work and you can taste a hod of mortar and a bucket of hot tar and one thing and another that have been left in the wings. You also judge that the insulation is burning off of an elec- tric fixture somewhere up stage. All this time the tooth is still offering resistance, and eventually the dentist comes out in front once more and makes a little curtain speech to you. He has just ascer- tained that what the tooth really needed was not filling but pulling. He thought at first that it should be filled, and that is what he has been doing — filling it — but now he knows that pulling is the indicated proced- ure. He does not understand how a tooth that seemed so open could have deceived him. Nevertheless he will now pull the tooth. He pulls her. She does her level best but he pulls her. He harvests small sections Teeth 6S of the gum from time to time and occasion- ally he stops long enough to loosen up the roots as far down as your floating ribs. But he pulls her. He spares no pains to pull that tooth. Or if he spares any you are not able subsequently to remember what they were. You utter various loud sounds in a strange and incomprehensible language and he lays back and braces his knees against your lower jaw, and the tooth utters the death rattle and begins picking the cover- lid. And then he gives one final heave and breaks the roots away from the lower part of your spinal column to which they were adhering, and emerges into the open pant- ing but triumphant, and holds his trophy up for you to look at. If you didn't know^ it was your tooth you would take it for an old-fashioned china cuspidor that had been neglected by the janitor. It was a tooth that you had been prizing for years, but now you wouldn't have it as a gracious gift. You are through with that tooth forever. You never want to see it again. As for the dentist, he collects the fixed 66 Cobb^s Anatomy charge for stumpage and corkage and one thing and another and you come away with a feeling in the side of your jaw like a va- cant lot. Your tongue keeps going over there to see if it can recognize the old place by the hole where the foundations used to be. You never realized before what a base- ment there was to a tooth. As you come out you pass a fresh victim going in and you see the dentist welcome him and then turn to crank up his motor and you hear the canary tuning up with a new line of v-shaped twitters. And you are glad that he is the one who is going in and that you are the one who is coming out. Science tells us that the teeth are the hard- est things in the human composition, which is all very well as far as it goes, but what science should do is to go on and finish the sentence. It means the hardest to keep. Cobb''s Anatomy HAIR Cobb's ylnatomy Hair As I REMARKED in the preceding chapter of this work, one of the b pleasantest features about being born is that we are born without teeth and other responsibilities. Teeth, like debts and installment payments, come along later on. It is the same way with hair. Born, we are, hairless or comparatively so. We are in a highly incomplete state at that period of our lives. It takes a fond and doting parent to detect evidences of an actual human aspect in us. Only the ears and the mouth appear to be up to the plans and specifications. There is a mouth which when opened, as it generally is, makes the rest of the face look like a tire, and there is a pair of ears of such generous size that only a third one is needed, round at the back somewhere, to give us the appearance of a 12 Cobb^s Anatomy loving cup. And we are smocked and hem- stitched with a million wrinkles apiece, more or less, which partly accounts for the fact that every newborn infant looks to be about two hundred years old. And uni- formly we have the nice red complexion of a restaurant lobster. You know that live- broiled look? As for our other features, they are more or less rudimentary. Of a nose there is only what a chemist would call a trace. It seems hard to imagine that a dinky little nubbin like that, a dimple turned inside out, as it were, will ever develop into a regular nose, with a capacity for freckling in the summer and catching cold in the winter — a nose that you can sneeze through and blow with. There are no eyebrows to speak of either, and the skull runs up to a sharp point like a pineapple cheese. Just back of the peak is a kind of soft, dented-in place like a Parker House roll, and if you touch it we die. In some cases this spot remains soft throughout life, and these persons grow up and go through railroad trains in presi- dential years taking straw votes. "IT TAKES A FOND AND DOTING PARENT TO DETECT EVIDENCES OF AN ACTUAL HUMAN ASPECT IN US" Hair 75 And, as I said before, there isn't any hair; only on the slopes of the cheese are some very pale, faint, downy lines, which look as though they had been sketched on lightly with a very soft drawing pencil and would wipe ofif readily. That, however, is the inception and beginning of what afterward becomes, among our race, hair. To look at it you could hardly believe it, but it is. Bar- ring accidents or backwardness, it continues to grow from that time on through our childhood, but its behavior is always a pro- found disappointment. If the child is a girl and, therefore, entitled to curly hair, her hair is sure to come in stifif and straight. If it's a boy, to whom curls will be a curse and a cross of affliction, he is morally cer- tain to be as curly as a frizzly chicken, and until he gets old enough to rebel he will wear long ringlets and boys of his acquaintance will insert cockle-burs and chewing gum into his tresses, and he will be known popularly as Sissie and other- wise his life with be made joyous and care- free for him. If a reddish tone of hair is desired it is certain to grow out yellow 16 Cobb^s Anatomy or brown or black; and if brown is your favorite shade you are absolutely sure to be nice and red-headed, with eyebrows and lashes to match, and so many cowlicks that when you remove your hat people will think you're wearing two or three halos at once. Hair rarely or never acts up to its advance notices. One of the earliest and most painful recol- lections of my youth is associated with hair. I still tingle warmly when I think of it. I should say I was about eight years old at the time. My mother sent me down the street to the barber's to have my hair trimmed — shingled was the term then used. Some of my private collection of cowlicks had begun to stand up in a way that invited adverse criticism and reminded people of sunbursts. They made me look as though my hair were trying to pull itself out by the roots and escape. So I was sent to the barber's. My little cousin, two years younger, went along in my charge. It was thought that the performance might enter- tain her. I was mounted in a chair and had a cloth tucked in round my neck, like a self- Hair 77 made millionaire about to eat consomme. The officiating barber got out a shiny steel instrument with jaws — the first pair of clip- pers I had ever seen — and he ran this up the back of my neck, producing a most agreeable feeling. He reached the top of my head and would have paused, but I told him to go right ahead and clip me close all over, which he did. When he had finished the job I was so delighted with the sensation and with the attendant result as viewed in a mirror that I suggested he might give my little cousin a similar treat. From a mere child I was ever so — willing always to share my simple pleasures with those about me, especially where it entailed no inconvenience on my part. I told him my father would pay the bill for both of us when he came by that night. The barber fell in with the suggestion. It has ever been my experience that a barber will fall in readily with any sug- gestion whereby the barber is going to get something out of it for himself. In this instance he was going to get another quarter, and a quarter went farther in 18 Cobb'^s Anatomy those days than it does now. I dismounted from the chair and my innocent little cousin was installed in my place. As I now recall she made no protest. The barber ran his clippers conscientiously and painstakingly over her tender young scalp, while I stood admiringly by and watched the long yellow curls fall writhing upon the floor at my feet. It seemed to me that a great and manifest improvement was pro- duced in her general appearance. Instead of being hampered by those silly curls dang- ling down all round her face, she now had a round, slick, smooth dome decorated with a stiff yellowish stubble, and the skin showed through nice and pink and the ears were well displayed, whereas before they had been practically hidden. She was also relieved of those foolish bangs hanging down in her eyes. This, I should have stated, occurred in the period when womankind of whatsoever age and also some men wore bangs, a disease from which all have since recovered with the exception of racehorses and princesses of the various reigning houses of Europe. And now my little cousin was WHILE I STOOD ADMIRINGLY BY AND WATCHED THE LONG YELLOW CURLS FALL WRITHING UPON THE FLOOR Hair 81 shut of those annoying bangs, and her fore- head ran up so high that you had to go round behind her to see where it left ofif. Filled with a joyous sense of achievement and conscious of a kindly deed worthily per- formed, I took my little cousin by her hand and led her home. My mother was waiting for us at the front door. She seemed surprised when I took ofif my hat and gave her a look, but that wasn't a circumstance to her surprise when I proudly took ofif my little cousin's cap. She uttered a kind of a strangled cry and my cousin's mother came running, and the way she carried on was scandalous and illtimed. I will draw a veil over the proceedings of the next few minutes. At the time it would have been a source of great personal grati- fication and comfort to me if I could have drawn a number of veils, good, thick, woolen ones, over the proceedings. My mother wept, my aunt wept, my little cousin wept, and I am not ashamed to state that I wept quite copiously myself. But I had more provocation to weep than any of them. 82 Cobb^s Anatomy When this part of the affair was over my mother sent me back to the barber with a message. I was to say that a heart-broken woman demanded to have the curls of which her darling child had been denuded. I believe that there was some idea enter- tained of sewing them into a cap and re- quiring my cousin to wear the cap until new ones had sprouted. Even to me, a mere child of eight, this seemed a foolish and to- tally unnecessary proceeding, but the situa- tion had already become so strained that I thought it the part of prudence to go at once without offering any arguments of my own. I felt, anyhow, that I would rather be away from the house for a while, until calmer second judgment had succeeded ex- citement and tumult. The man who owned the barber shop seemed surprised when I delivered the mes- sage, but he told me to come back in a few minutes and he'd do what he could. I drifted on down to the confectionery store at the corner to forget my sorrows for the moment in a worshipful admiration of a display of prize boxes and cracknels in i^ '^ I ^' 'M « PP " THE WAY SHE CARRIED ON WAS SCANDALOUS AND ILL-TIMED Hair 85 glass-front cases — you should be able to fix the period by the fact that cracknels and prize boxes were still in vogue among the young. When I returned the head barber handed me quite a large box — a shoebox — with a string tied round it. It did not seem possible to me that my cousin could have had a whole shoebox full of curls, but things had been going pretty badly that afternoon and my motives had been mis- judged and everything, so without any talk I took the box and hurried home with it. My mother cut the string and my aunt lifted the lid. I should prefer again to draw a veil over the scenes that now ensued, but the necessity of finishing this narrative requires me to state that it being a Saturday and the head barber being a busy man, he had not taken time to sort out my cousin's curls from among the flotsam and jetsam of his estab- lishment, but had just swept up enough off the floor to make a good assorted boxful. I think the oldest inhabitant had probably dropped in that day to have himself trim- med up a little round the edges. I seem to 86 Cobb^s Anatomy remember a quantity of sandy whiskers shot with gray. There was enough hair in that box and enough different kinds and colors of hair and stuff to satisfy almost any taste, you would have thought, but my mother and aunt were anything but satisfied. On the contrary, far from it. And yet my cousin's hair was all there, if they had only been willing to spend a few days sorting it out and separating it from the other contents. In this particular instance I was the ex- ception to the rule, that hair generally gives a boy no great trouble from the time he merges out of babyhood until he puts on long pants and begins to discern something strangely and subtly attractive about the sex described by Mr. Kipling as being the more deadly of the species. During this interim it is a matter of no moment to a boy whether he goes shaggy or cropped, shorn or un- shorn. At intervals a frugal parent trims him to see if both his ears are still there, or else a barber does it with more thorough- ness, often recovering small articles of household use that have been mysteriously missing for months ; but in the main he goes Hair 82_ along carefree and unbarbered, not greatly concerned with putting anything in his head or taking anything off of it. In due season, though, he reaches the age where adolescent whiskers and young ro- mance begin to sprout out on him simulta- neously — and from that moment on for the rest of his life his hair is giving him bother, and plenty of it. Your hair gives you bother as long as you have it and more bother when it starts to go. You are always doing something for it and it is always showing deep-dyed 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 an- guish, added expense, Chinese revolutions, and the standard joke about your wife's using your best razor to open a can of to- matoes with. Hair has been of aid to Buf- • falo 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 sor- 88 Cobb^s Anatomy row 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 shav- ing. 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 par- ticularly, but your rage and frequently your undying hatred. Once in a burst of confi- dence 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 pro- cess of being shaved. Indeed there is some- thing restful and soothing to the average "EVERY FACE FELL INTO ONE OF THREE CLASSES, IT BEING EITHER A SQUARE, A ROUND OR A SQUIRREL" Hair 91 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 sen- sation of transient silken smoothness. Nor do I refer to the barber's habit of conversa- tion. 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 fol- lows 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. Know- ing from your own lips that you want a shave and that's positively all, he neverthe- less is instantly filled with a burning desire to equip you with a large number of other things. In this regard the barbering pro- fession has much in common with the hab- 92 Cobb^s Anatomy erdashering or gents'-furnishing profession as practiced in our larger cities. You in- vade a haberdashering establishment for the purpose, let us say, of investing in a plain and simple pair of half hose, price twenty- five cents. That emphatically is all that you do desire. You so state in plain, simple language, using the shorter and uglier word socks. Does the youth in the pale mauve shirt with the marquise ring on the little finger of the left hand rest content with this? Need I answer this question? In succession he tries to sell you a fancy waistcoat with large pearl buttons, a broken lot of silk pa- jamas, a bath-robe, some shrimp-pink un- derwear — he wears this kind himself he tells you in strict confidence — a pair of plush suspenders and a knitted necktie that you wouldn't be caught wearing at twelve o'clock at night at the bottom of a coal mine during a total eclipse of the moon. If you resist his blandishments and so far forget that you are a gentleman as to use harsh language, and if you insist on a pair of socks and nothing else, he'll let you have Hair 93_ them, but he will never feel the same to- ward you as he did. 'Tis much the same with a barber. You need a shave in a hurry and he is willing that you should have a shave, he being there for that purpose, but first and last he can think of upward of thirty or forty other things that you ought to have, including a shampoo, a hair cut, a hair singe, a hair tonic, a hair oil, a manicure, a facial mas- sage, a scalp massage, a Turkish bath, his opinion on the merits of the newest White Hope, a shoeshine, some kind of a skin food, and a series of comparisons of the weather we are having this time this month with the weather we were having this time last month. Not all of us are gifted with the power of repartee by which my friend Fris- bee turned the edge of the barber's desires. ^^Your hair," said the barber, fondling a truant lock, ^4s long." ^^I know it is," said Frisbee. ^^I like it long. It's so Roycrofty." ^^It is very long," said the barber with a wistful expression. "I like it very long," said Frisbee, ''I 94 Cobb^s Anatomy like to have people come up to me on the street and call me Mr. Sutherland and ask me how I left my sisters? I like to be mis- taken for a Russian pianist. I like for strangers to stop me and ask me how's every- thing up at East Aurora. In short, I like it long." ^^Yes, sir," said the barber, ^^quite so, sir; but it's very long, particularly here in the back — it covers your coat collar." ^^Indeed?" said Frisbee. ^^You say it covers my coat collar?" ^/Yes, sir," said the barber. ^^You can't see the coat collar at all." ^^Have you got a good sharp pair of shears there?" said Frisbee. ^^Oh, yes, sir," said the barber. ^^All right then," said Frisbee; ^^cut the collar ofif." But not all of us, as I said before, have this ready gift of parry and thrust that dis- tinguishes my friend Frisbee. Mostly we weakly surrender. Or if we refuse to sur- render, demanding just a shave by itself and nothing else, what then follows? In my own case, speaking personally, I know Hair 95 exactly what follows. I do not like to have any powder dabbed on my face when I am through shaving. I believe in letting the bloom of youth show through your skin^ providing you have any bloom of youth to do so. I always take pains to state my views in this regard at least twice during the oper- ation of being shaved — once at the start when the barber has me all lathered up, with soapsuds dripping from the flanges of my shell-like ears and running down my neck, and once again toward the close of the operation, when he has laid aside his razor and is sousing my defenseless features in a liquid that smells and tastes a good deal like those scented pink blotters they used to give away at drug-stores to advertise some- body's cologne. Does the barber respect my wishes in this regard? Certainly not. He insists on pow- dering me, either before my eyes or surrep- titiously and in a clandestine manner. If he didn't powder me up he would lose his sense of self-respect, and probably the union would take his card away from him. I think there is something in the constitution 96 Cobb'^s Anatomy and by-laws requiring that I be powdered up. I have fought the good fight for years, but Fm always powdered. Sometimes the crafty foe dissembles. He pretends that he is not going to powder me up. But all of a sudden when my back is turned, as it were, he grabs up his powder swab and makes a quick swoop upon me and the hellish deed is done. I should be pleased to hear from other victims of this practice suggesting any practical relie