I could feel it growing, and the first scrubbiness of it filled me
with rage. But as time slipped by it became softer and more pliable,
and ceased to irritate me. Freed, too, from the agony of shaving, I
soon found myself eating my breakfast in a more equable frame of mind
than I had enjoyed for years. I began also to notice in my walks all
sorts of things that had not struck me at first--the lark a-twitter
in the blue, the good smell of wet earth after rain, the pale gold of
ripening wheat. And at last, before ever I saw it, very gradually I
came to love my beard, to love the warm comfort and cosiness of it,
and to wonder half timidly what it looked like.

When I left, just before my departure for the six-miles-distant
station, I called for a looking-glass. They brought me a piece of the
one I had cast away. It was very small, but it served my purpose. I
gazed and heaved a sigh of rapturous content; a sigh that came from my
very heart. My beard was short and thick, its colour a deep glorious
brown, with golden lights here and there where the sunbeams danced in
some lighter cluster of its curling strands. A beard that a king might
wear.

I have never shaved again. Every morning now, while untold millions
of my suffering fellows are groaning beneath their razors, I steal an
extra fifteen minutes from the day and lie and laugh inside my beard.

"And what of Emily?" you ask.

Almost immediately after my return she left us. She gave no reason.
She was not unhappy, she said. She wished to make a change, that was
all. To this day my wife cannot account for her departure. But I know
why she went. Emily was a patriot with a purpose. A month after she