Fortunately the process does not always go so smoothly. There are times when the Local Brotherhood of Razors have gone on strike and refuse to be stropped. There are times at which the twelve interchangeable blades are hardly better for shaving than twelve interchangeable postage-stamps. There are times when the lather might have been fairly guaranteed to dry on the face. There are times when Little Alum, the shaver's friend, might well feel the sting of his own powerlessness. But these times are the blessed cause of genial satisfaction when everything goes happily.
Truly it is worth while to grow a beard--for the sake of shaving it off. Not such a beard as one might starch and curl--but the beginnings--an obfuscation of the chin, cheeks, and upper lip--a horror of unseemly growth--a landscape of the face comparable to
that ominous tract which, all agree, Hides the Dark Tower
in Browning's grim poem of 'Childe Roland.' _Then_ is the time to strop your favorite razor! I wonder, while stropping mine, if any man still lives who uses a moustache cup?
Any man who knows that, sooner or later, he must go to another afternoon tea cannot but rejoice at the recent invention of an oval, platter-like saucer, large enough to hold with ease a cup, a lettuce or other sandwich, and a dainty trifle of pastry. The thing was needed: the modesty of the anonymous inventor--evidently _not_ Mr. Edison--reveals him one of the large body of occasional and unwilling tea-goers. We, the reluctant and unwilling, are all strangely alike at these functions; and we have all been embarrassed by the old-fashioned saucer. Circular in shape, and hardly larger than the cup that belies its reputation and dances drunkenly whenever another guest joggles our elbow,--which happens so often that we suspect conspiracy,--the old-fashioned saucer affords no reasonably secure perch for a sandwich; responds with delight to the law of gravitation if left to itself; and sets us wishing, those of us who think scientifically, that evolution had refrained from doing away with an extension by which alone we could now hope to manage it. _We mean a tail!_ If afternoon teas had been started in the Oligocene Epoch instead of the seventeenth century, we are convinced that evolution, far from discarding this useful appendage, would have perfected it. A little hand would have evolved at the end of it--such a one as might hold a Perfect Gentleman's saucer while he sipped from his tea-cup.