You also say that "teething is the most trying time for parents." Do you mean that parents are more fretful when they are teething than any other time? Your mother and me reckoned that you must mean that. If so, it shows your great research. How a mere child hardly out of knee-panties, a young shoot like you, who was never a parent for a moment in his life, can enter into and understand the woes that beset parents is more than I can understand. If you had been through what I have while teething I could see how you might understand and write about it, but at present I do not see through it. The first teeth I cut as a parent made me very restless. I was sick two years ago with a new disease that was just out and the doctor gave me something for it that made my teeth fall like the leaves of autumn. In six weeks after I began to convalesce my mouth was perfectly bald-headed. For days I didn't bite into a Ben Davis apple that I didn't leave a fang into it.
Well, after that I saw an advertisement in the Rural Rustler—a paper I used to take then—of a place where you could get a set of teeth for $6.
I didn't want to buy a high-priced and gaudy set of teeth at the tail end of such a life as I had led, and I knew that teeth, no matter how expensive they might be, would be of little avail to coming generations, so I went over to the place named in the paper and got an impression of my mouth taken.
There is really nothing in this life that will take the stiff-necked pride out of a man like viewing a plaster cast of his tottering mouth. The dentist fed me with a large ladle full of putty or plaster of paris, I reckon, and told me to hold it in my mouth till it set.
I don't remember a time in all my life when the earth and transitory things ever looked so undesirable and so trifling as they did while I sat there in that big red barber-chair with my mouth full of cold putty. I felt just as a man might when he is being taxidermied.
After awhile the dentist took out the cast. It was a cloudy day and so it didn't look much like me after all. If it had I would have sent you one. After I'd set again two or three times, we got a pretty fair likeness, he said, and I went home, having paid $6 and left my address.
Three weeks after that a small boy came with my new teeth.
They were nice, white, shiny teeth, and did not look very ghastly after I had become used to them. I wished at first that the gums had been a duller red and that the teeth had not looked so new. I put them in my mouth, but they felt cold and distant. I took them out and warmed them in the sunlight. People going by no doubt thought that I did it to show that I was able to have new teeth, but that was not the case.
I wore them all that forenoon while I butchered. There were times during the forenoon when I wanted to take them out, but when a man is butchering he hates to take his teeth out just because they hurt.
Neighbors told me that after my mouth got hardened on the inside it would feel better.