ache will counterbalance them. I read in my volume of
_Romantic Love and Personal Beauty_ that 'the movements of the
moustache are dependent on the muscle called _depressor alae nasi_. By
specially cultivating this muscle, men might in course of time make the
movements of the moustache subject to voluntary control.'

Just think what a capacity for emotional expression lies in such a
simple organ as the dog's caudal appendage, aptly called the
'psychographic tail' by Vischer; and moustaches are double, and
therefore equal to two psychographic appendages! Truly I know not of
which to think first--a happy gentleman wagging his moustache or a happy
dog wagging two tails. And yet here am I, shaving away the daily effort
of this double psychographic appendage to become visible! One might
almost think that my _depressor alae nasi_ was a vermiform appendix.

It has been said by some critics that whiskers are a disguise. I should
be unwilling to commit myself to this belief; nor can I accept the
contrary conviction that whiskers are a gift of Almighty Providence in
which the Giver is so sensitively interested that to shave them off is
to invite eternal punishment of a kind--and this, I think, destroys the
theory--that would singe them off in about two seconds. Whiskers are
real, and sometimes uncomfortably earnest; the belief that they betoken
an almost brutal masculine force is visible in this, that those whose
whiskers are naturally thinnest take the greatest satisfaction in
possessing them--seem, in fact, to say proudly, '_These_ are my
whiskers!' But I cannot feel that a gentleman is any more disguised by
his whiskers, real, ready-made, or made to order, than he would be if he
appeared naked or in a ready-made or made-to-order suit. Whiskers, in
fact, are a subtle revelation of real character, whether the kind that
exist as a soft, mysterious haze about the lower features or such as
inspired the immortal limerick,--I quote from memory,--

There was an old man with a beard
Who said, 'I am greatly afeard
Two larks and a hen,
A jay and a wren,
Have each made a nest in my beard.'

Yet I feel also, and strongly, that the man who shaves clean stands, as
it were, on his own face.

We have, indeed, but to visualize clearly the spectacle of a gentleman
shaving himself and put beside it the spectacle of a gentleman starching
and curling his whiskers, to see the finer personal dignity that has
come with the gen