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After he has gashed me casually hither and yen, and sluiced down my helpless countenance with the carefree abandon of a livery-stable hand washing off a buggy, and after, as above stated, he has covered up the traces of his crime with powder, the barber next takes a towel and folds it over his right hand, as prescribed in the rules and regulations, and then he dabs me with that towel on various parts of my face nine hundred and seventy-four–974–separate and distinct times. I know the exact number of dabs because I have taken the trouble to keep count. I may be in as great a hurry as you can imagine; I may be but a poor nervous wreck already, as I am; I may be quivering to be up and away from there, but he dabs me with his towel–he dabs me until reason totters on her throne–sometimes just a tiny tot, as the saying goes, or it may be that the whole cerebral structure is involved–and then when he is apparently all through the Demoniac Dabber comes back and dabs me one more fiendish, deliberate and premeditated dab, making nine hundred and seventy-five dabs in all. He has to do it; it’s in the ritual that I and you and everybody must have that last dab. I wonder how many gibbering idiots there are in the asylum today whose reason was overthrown by being dabbed that last farewell dab. I know from my own experience that I can feel the little dark-green gibbers sloshing round inside of me every time it happens, and some day my mind will give away altogether and there’ll be a hurry call sent in for the wagon with the lock on the back door. Yet it is of no avail to cavil or protest; we cannot hope to escape; we can only sit there in mute and helpless misery and be filled with a great envy for Mexican hairless dogs.

For quite a spell now we have been speaking of hair on the face; at this point we revert to hair in its relation to the head. There are some few among us, mainly professional Southerners and leading men, who retain the bulk of the hair on their heads through life; but with most of us the circumstances are different. Your hair goes from you. You don’t seem to notice it at first; then all of a sudden you wake up to the realization that your head is working its way up through the hair. You start in then desperately doing things for your hair in the hope of inducing it to stick round the old place a while longer, but it has heard the call of the wild and it is on its way. There’s no detaining it. You soak your skull in lotions until your brain softens and your hat-band gets moldy from the damp, but your hair keeps right on going.

After a while it is practically gone. If only about two-thirds of it is gone your head looks like a great auk’s egg in a snug nest; but if most of it goes there is something about you that suggests the Glacial Period, with an icy barren peak rising high above the vegetation line, where a thin line of heroic strands still cling to the slopes. You are bald then, a subject fit for the japes of the wicked and universally coupled in the betting with onions, with hard-boiled eggs and with the front row of orchestra chairs at a musical show.

At this time of writing baldness is creeping insidiously up each side of my head. It is executing flank movements from the temples northward, and some day the two columns will meet and after that I’ll be considerably more of a highbrow than I am now. At present I am craftily combing the remaining thatch in the middle and smoothing it out nice and flat, so as to keep those bare spots covered–thinly perhaps, but nevertheless covered. It is my earnest desire to continue to keep them covered. I am not a professional beauty; I am not even what you would call a good amateur beauty; and I want to make what little hair I have go as far as it conveniently can. But does the barber to whom I repair at frequent intervals coincide with my desires in this respect? Again I reply he does not. Every time I go in I speak to him about it. I say to him: “Woodman, spare that hair, touch not a single strand; in youth it sheltered me and I’ll protect it now.” Or in substance that.