n the dashboard railing; and in that
position I left them, with yellow-haired Miss Jimmeny from the corner
pub. walking by on the broken asphalt under the verandahs, and casting
a contemptuous and condemnatory glance at the forward Dawn who
favoured the men.

Mr S. Messre led the way to a place at the back of the shop which was
layered with dust and strewn with cotton-wool and dental appliances,
some of them smeared from the preceding victims, evidently. He did not
seem to know how to dispose of me, so I placed myself in the
professional chair and invited him to examine the broken molar.

"The light is bad here," he remarked, fumbling with my head, and
making towards my face with one of the soiled instruments.

"That is not my fault," I replied.

"This is him!" he further remarked, tapping my cheek with a finger.

"Yes."

"He wants patching."

"So _he_ leads me to imagine."

"The nerve would want killing."

"Quite so, and to attend to its wants I'm here."

"I'd take eight shillings to kill the nerve."

"Would you use them as an apparatus to execute it?"

"Then I'd take twelve or thirteen shillings to fill it," he continued.

I was interested in the uniqueness of his methods.

"Would you purpose to powder the shillings or use them whole--I would
have thought an alligator's or shark's tooth would scarcely require
that quantity of material?"

Mr Messre stared at me in a dazed manner.

"I wouldn't touch the tooth under that," he continued.

"Is there another tooth under it? then extract this one and give the
other a fair chance."

"It would be a lot of trouble," he kept on, without specially replying
to my remark.

"Perhaps so; when one comes to think of it, teeth, I suppose, are not
filled without some exercise on the part of the dentist."

"I wouldn't think of touching that tooth for less than a guinea; why
it would take at least an hour to do it."

"This is the first intimation I've had that dentists calculated to
mend teeth without spending any time on them," I said.

Mr Messre didn't seem to grasp the drift of my remarks, and as I felt
unequal to maintaining the conversation for a more extended period, I
announced my intention of thinking about what he had said. He said it
would be as well, and I emerged to find Ernest had so far progressed
as to be seated in the sulky holding my parasol over Dawn.

Youth and beauty is privileged to command an athlete to hold its
sunshade, while old age ha