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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 anguish, added expense, Chinese revolutions, and the standard joke about your wife’s using your best razor to open a can of tomatoes with. Hair has been of aid to Buffalo 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 sorrow 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 shaving. 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 particularly, but your rage and frequently your undying hatred. Once in a burst of confidence 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 process of being shaved. Indeed there is something restful and soothing to the average 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 sensation of transient silken smoothness. Nor do I refer to the barber’s habit of conversation. 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 follows 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. Knowing from your own lips that you want a shave and that’s positively all, he nevertheless is instantly filled with a burning desire to equip you with a large number of other things. In this regard the barbering profession has much in common with the haberdashering or gents’-furnishing profession as practiced in our larger cities. You invade 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 pajamas, a bath-robe, some shrimp-pink underwear–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 them, but he will never feel the same toward you as he did.