tual work.

Three-thirty draws near. A horrible time of day at best. Just when a
man's vitality is lowest. Before stepping in out of the sunlight into
the building in which the dental parlor is, you take one look about you
at the happy people scurrying by in the street. Carefree children that
they are! What do they know of Life? Probably that man in the
silly-looking hat never had trouble with so much as his baby-teeth.
There they go, pushing and jostling each other, just as if within ten
feet of them there was not a man who stands on the brink of the Great
Misadventure. Ah well! Life is like that!

Into the elevator. The last hope is gone. The door clangs and you look
hopelessly about you at the stupid faces of your fellow passengers. How
can people be so clownish? Of course, there is always the chance that
the elevator will fall and that you will all be terribly hurt. But that
is too much to expect. You dismiss it from your thoughts as too
impractical, too visionary. Things don't work out as happily as that in
real life.

You feel a certain glow of heroic pride when you tell the operator the
right floor number. You might just as easily have told him a floor too
high or too low, and that would, at least, have caused delay. But after
all, a man must prove himself a man and the least you can do is to meet
Fate with an unflinching eye and give the right floor number.

Too often has the scene in the dentist's waiting-room been described for
me to try to do it again here. They are all alike. The antiseptic smell,
the ominous hum from the operating-rooms, the 1921 "Literary Digests,"
and the silent, sullen, group of waiting patients, each trying to look
unconcerned and cordially disliking everyone else in the room,--all
these have been sung by poets of far greater lyric powers than mine.
(Not that I really think that they _are_ greater than mine, but that's
the customary form of excuse for not writing something you haven't got
time or space to do. As a matter of fact, I think I could do it much
better than it has ever been done before).

I can only say that, as you sit looking, with unseeing eyes, through a
large book entitled, "The Great War in Pictures," you would gladly
change places with the most lowly of God's creatures. It is
inconceivable that there should be anyone worse off than you, unless
perhaps it is some of the poor wretches who are waiting with you.

That one over in the arm-chair, nervously tearing to s