the front parlor reading the Hammer Thrower's Gazette, welcomes
you with a false air of gaiety entirely out of keeping with the
circumstances and invites you to step right in. He tells you
that you are next. This is wrong--if you were next you would
turn and flee like a deer. Not being next, you enter. Right
from the start you seem to take a dislike to this young man. You
catch him spitting in his hands and hitching his sleeves up as
you are hanging up your hat. Besides he is too robust for a
dentist. With those shoulders he ought to be a boiler maker or a
safe mover or something of that sort. You resolve inwardly that
next time you go to a dentist you are going to one of a more
lady-like bearing and gentler demeanor. It seems a brutal thing
that a big strong man should waste his years in a dental
establishment when the world is clamoring for strong men to do
the heavy lifting jobs. But before you can say anything, this
muscular athlete has laid violent hands on your palpitating form
and wadded it abruptly into the hideous embraces of a red plush
chair, which looks something like the one they use up at Sing
Sing, only it's done more quickly up there and with less suffering
on the part of the condemned. On one side of you you behold quite
a display of open plumbing and on the other side a tasty exhibit
of small steel tools of assorted sizes. No matter which way your
gaze may stray you'll be seeing something attractive.

You also take notice of an electric motor about large enough, you
would say, to run a trolley car, which is purring nearby in a
sinister and forbidding way. They are constantly making these
little improvements in the dental profession. I have heard that
fifty years ago a dentist traveled about over the country from
place to place, sometimes pulling a tooth and sometimes breaking a