e bangs, a disease
from which all have since recovered with the exception of racehorses and
princesses of the various reigning houses of Europe. And now my little
cousin was shut of those annoying bangs, and her forehead ran up so high
that you had to go round behind her to see where it left off.

Filled with a joyous sense of achievement and conscious of a kindly
deed worthily performed, I took my little cousin by her hand and led her
home.

My mother was waiting for us at the front door. She seemed surprised
when I took off my hat and gave her a look, but that wasn't a
circumstance to her surprise when I proudly took off my little cousin's
cap. She uttered a kind of a strangled cry and my cousin's mother came
running, and the way she carried on was scandalous and ill-timed. I will
draw a veil over the proceedings of the next few minutes. At the time it
would have been a source of great personal gratification and comfort to
me if I could have drawn a number of veils, good, thick, woolen ones,
over the proceedings. My mother wept, my aunt wept, my little cousin
wept, and I am not ashamed to state that I wept quite copiously myself.
But I had more provocation to weep than any of them.

When this part of the affair was over my mother sent me back to the
barber with a message. I was to say that a heart-broken woman demanded
to have the curls of which her darling child had been denuded. I believe
that there was some idea entertained of sewing them into a cap and
requiring my cousin to wear the cap until new ones had sprouted. Even to
me, a mere child of eight, this seemed a foolish and totally unnecessary
proceeding, but the situation had already become so strained that I
thought it the part of prudence to go at once without offering any
arguments of my own. I felt, anyhow, that I would rather be away from
the house for a while, until calmer second judgment had succeeded
excitement and tumult.

The man who owned the barber shop seemed surprised when I delivered the
message, but he told me to come back in a few minutes and he'd do what
he could. I drifted on down to the confectionery store at the corner to
forget my sorrows for the moment in a worshipful admiration of a display
of prize boxes and cracknels in glass-front cases--you should be able to
fix the period by the fact that cracknels and prize boxes were still in
vogue among the young. When I returned the head barber handed me quite a
large box--a shoebox--with a