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