eks or so we get our hair cut.

We are not generally parsimonious of our employer's time, but somehow we
do hate to squander that thirty-three minutes, which is the exact
chronicide involved in despoiling our skull of a ten weeks' garner. If
we were to have our hair cut at the end of eight weeks the shearing
would take only thirty-one minutes; but we can never bring ourselves to
rob our employer of that much time until we reckon he is really losing
prestige by our unkempt appearance. Of course, we believe in having our
hair cut during office hours. That is the only device we know to make
the hateful operation tolerable.

To the times mentioned above should be added fifteen seconds, which is
the slice of eternity needed to trim, prune and chasten our mustache,
which is not a large group of foliage.

We knew a traveling man who never got his hair cut except when he was on
the road, which permitted him to include the transaction in his expense
account; but somehow it seems to us more ethical to steal time than to
steal money.

We like to view this whole matter in a philosophical and ultra-pragmatic
way. Some observers have hazarded that our postponement of haircuts is
due to mere lethargy and inertia, but that is not so. Every time we get
our locks shorn our wife tells us that we have got them too short. She
says that our head has a very homely and bourgeois bullet shape, a sort
of pithecanthropoid contour, which is revealed by a close trim. After
five weeks' growth, however, we begin to look quite distinguished. The
difficulty then is to ascertain just when the law of diminishing returns
comes into play. When do we cease to look distinguished and begin to
appear merely slovenly? Careful study has taught us that this begins to
take place at the end of sixty-five days, in warm weather. Add five days
or so for natural procrastination and devilment, and we have seventy
days interval, which we have posited as the ideal orbit for our
tonsorial ecstasies.

When at last we have hounded ourself into robbing our employer of those
thirty-three minutes, plus fifteen seconds for you know what, we find
ourself in the barber's chair. Despairingly we gaze about at the little
blue flasks with flowers enameled on them; at the piles of clean
towels; at the bottles of mandrake essence which we shall presently
have to affirm or deny. Under any other circumstances we should deeply
enjoy a half hour spent in a comfortable chair, with nothi