colt. He practiced his art with an outfit consisting of two pairs
of iron forceps--one pair being saber-toothed while the other pair
was merely saw-fretted--and he gave a man the same kind of
treatment he gave a horse, only he tied the horse's legs first.
But now electricity is in general use and no dentist's
establishment is complete without a dynamo attachment which makes
a crooning sound when in operation and provides instrumental
accompaniment to the song of the official canary.

I know why a barber in a country town is always learning to play
on the guitar and I know why a man with an emotional Adam's apple
always wears an open front collar. I know these things, but am
debarred from telling them by reason of a solemn oath. But I have
not yet been able to discover why every dentist keeps a canary in
his office. Nor do I know why it is, just as you settle your neck
back on a head rest that's every bit as comfortable as an anvil,
and just as a dentist climbs into you as far as the arm pits and
begins probing at the bottom of a tooth which has roots extending
back behind your ears, like an old-fashioned pair of spectacles,
that the canary bird should wipe his nose on a cuttle bone and
dash into a melodious outburst of two hundred thousand twitters,
all of them being twitters of the same size, shape, and color.
For that matter, I don't even know what kind of an animal a cuttle
is, although I should say from the shape of his bone as used by
the canary instead of a pocket handkerchief, that he is circular
and flat and stands on edge only with the utmost difficulty. If
you will pardon my temporary digressions into the realm of natural
history, we will now return to the main subject, which was your
tooth.