Here he hesitated for a word, and I, although I knew nothing about
the matter, helped him out with suggestions in the same rhetorical vein.

"Or a button-hook," I said, "or a blunderbuss or a battering-ram
or a piston-rod----"

He resumed, refreshed with this assistance, "Or a curtain rod
or a candle-stick, or a----"

"Cow-catcher," I suggested eagerly, and we continued in this ecstatic duet
for some time. Then I asked him what it was all about, and he told me.
He explained the thing eloquently and at length.

"The funny part of it is," he said, "that the thing isn't new at all.
It's been talked about ever since I was a boy, and long before.
There is always a notion that the razor might be done without somehow.
But none of those schemes ever came to anything; and I don't believe
myself that this will."

"Why, as to that," I said, rising slowly from the chair and trying
to put on my coat inside out, "I don't know how it may be in the case
of you and your new shaving. Shaving, with all respect to you,
is a trivial and materialistic thing, and in such things
startling inventions are sometimes made. But what you say
reminds me in some dark and dreamy fashion of something else.
I recall it especially when you tell me, with such evident
experience and sincerity, that the new shaving is not really new.
My friend, the human race is always trying this dodge of making
everything entirely easy; but the difficulty which it shifts off