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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 entertained of sewing them into a cap and requiring my cousin to wear the cap until new ones had sprouted. Even to me, a mere child of eight, this seemed a foolish and totally unnecessary proceeding, but the situation 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 excitement and tumult.

The man who owned the barber shop seemed surprised when I delivered the message, 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 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 misjudged 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 establishment, 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 trimmed up a little round the edges. I seem to 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 exception 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 unshorn. At intervals a frugal parent trims him to see if both his ears are still there, or else a barber does it with more thoroughness, often recovering small articles of household use that have been mysteriously missing for months; but in the main he goes 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 romance begin to sprout out on him simultaneously–and from that moment on for the rest of his life his hair is giving him bother, and plenty of it.