One barber in Wisconsin, to whom I facetiously complained that he should not charge me full price for a haircut when there was so little to cut, came back immediately with, "Ah, but you see I had to work overtime to find it!"
Another in Boston, after shaving me, inquired, "Now how do you want your hair brushed?"
"Brush it back like that young man's in the next chair," said I, pointing to a Harvard student with a perfect mop of hair, resembling a huge yellow chrysanthemum, which the neighboring artist was brushing laboriously back from the youthful forehead.
"Humph!" said my friend. "I'll try; but, take it from me, it'll take a blistering long time to brush your hair back!"
But the readiest bit of repartee that I recall in respect to this shortcoming was that of a Philadelphia barber two years ago, who was trying to make me presentable for my audience that night in the Witherspoon Hall University extension course, where I was to deliver a series of lectures on American humorists.
"Now," said he, running his hand over the back of my head after he had attended to my other needs, "how do you want your hair fixed?"
"In silence, and without humor," said I. "I am approaching my fiftieth year in this world, and since thirty I have been as you see me now. In the course of those twenty intervening years I have heard about every joke on the subject of baldness that the human mind has been able to conceive at least fifty thousand times."
"I guess that's right," said he. "You are pretty bald, ain't you?"
"I am, and I am not at all ashamed of it," I returned. "My baldness has been honestly acquired. I have not lost my hair in dissipation, or by foolish speculation, but entirely through generosity of spirit. I have given my hair to my children."
"Gee!" he ejaculated with fervor. "You must have the divvle of a large family!"