skull in lotions until your brain softens and your hat-band gets
moldy from the damp, but your hair keeps right on going.

After a while it is practically gone. If only about two-thirds of
it is gone your head looks like a great auk's egg in a snug nest;
but if most of it goes there is something about you that suggests
the Glacial Period, with an icy barren peak rising high above the
vegetation line, where a thin line of heroic strands still cling
to the slopes. You are bald then, a subject fit for the japes of
the wicked and universally coupled in the betting with onions, with
hard-boiled eggs and with the front row of orchestra chairs at a
musical show.

At this time of writing baldness is creeping insidiously up each
side of my head. It is executing flank movements from the temples
northward, and some day the two columns will meet and after that
I'll be considerably more of a highbrow than I am now. At present
I am craftily combing the remaining thatch in the middle and
smoothing it out nice and flat, so as to keep those bare spots
covered--thinly perhaps, but nevertheless covered. It is my
earnest desire to continue to keep them covered. I am not a
professional beauty; I am not even what you would call a good
amateur beauty; and I want to make what little hair I have go as
far as it conveniently can. But does the barber to whom I repair
at frequent intervals coincide with my desires in this respect?
Again I reply he does not. Every time I go in I speak to him
about it. I say to him: "Woodman, spare that hair, touch not a
single strand; in youth it sheltered me and I'll protect it now."
Or in substance that.