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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 suffer 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 horrible yell and in the lulls between pangs you 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 puffed 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.

This happens so many times that after awhile you lose count and so would the dentist, if he didn’t write your name down every time in his little red book with pleasingly 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 building permit. As time passes on, the inside of your once well-tilled and commodious head becomes but little more than a recent site. Your vaults have been blown and most of your contents abstracted by Amalgam 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 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 deceiving 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, because 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 very determined dog and very active, but he needs a manicure. You are struck by that fact almost immediately.