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