Mr Smith—Mr Artaxerxes Smith—in his younger days had often visited the hairdresser’s, to sit in state with a flowing print robe tucked in all round his neck, but not so close but the tiny snips and chips from his Hyperion curls would get down within his shirt-collar, and tickle and tease for hours after; he had listened while the oily-tongued—scented oily-tongued—hairdresser had snipped away and told him that his hair was turning a little grey, or that it was growing thin at the crown, or very dry, or full of dandriff, or coming off, or suffering from one of those inevitable failings which are never discoverable save when having one’s hair cut. “Our Philo-homo-coma Brushitinibus would remove the symptoms in a few days, sir,” the hairdresser would say; “remove the dandriff, clarify the scalp, soften the hair, and bring up a fine soft down that would soon strengthen into flowing locks.” But though in the glass before him Mr Smith could see the noble hair and brilliant whiskers of his operator, he would not listen, he only growled out, “Make haste,” or “Never mind,” or something else very rude, and the consequence was that he suffered for his neglect of the good hairdressers advice, so that at last Mr Smith couldn’t have given any one a lock of his hair to save his life. He was bald—completely bald—his head looked like vegetable ivory, and in despair he consulted a Saville-row physician.
“Nature, sir, nature,” said the great man; “a peculiarity of constitution, a failing in the absorbents and dessicating, wasting in the structural development of the cuticle and sub-cuticle—the hair being a small filament issuing from the surface of the scalp from a bulbous radix, and forming a capillary covering; which covering, in your case, has failed, sir, failed.”
Mr Smith knew that before he made up his mind to invest a guinea, but he only said—
“And what course should you pursue in my case?”
“Well, yes—er—er—um, ah! I should—er—that is to say, I should wear a wig.”
That was just what Mr Smith’s hairdresser had told him for nothing, though, certainly, with sundry ideas in petto that it might fall to his task to make this wig; but Mr Smith had expected something else from a man who put MD at the end of his name.
“Too big for his profession,” said Mr Smith, and he bought a pot of the Count de Caput Medusae’s Golden Balm, prepared from the original recipe given by that inventive Count to the aunt’s cousin’s uncle of the proprietor.
“Try another pot, sir,” said the vendor, examining the bare head with a powerful magnifying glass. “Perfect down on the surface, sir, though not plain to the naked eye. I should advise the large twenty-two shilling pots, sir, and the vigorous rubbing in, to be continued night and morning.”
But if there had been any down it knew better than to stop and suffer the scrubbing inflicted by Mr Smith upon his bare poll, and a month only found him with the scalp turned from waxy-white to pinky-red, while his head was sore to a degree.
“Jackal’s formula produces hair, beard, or whiskers upon the smoothest skin.”