"I am but a man; a featherless biped, as the divine Plato put it; though not, I should hope, Voltaire the cynic’s plucked chicken; and, as a man, I can only agree that the future is unknowable until it shall have become first present and then past; while, as a man named William Legrand- -commonly called Bill-I can only assert that no change perceptible to me other than the relief of my distress through your art has eventuated in the time that is now the recent past, this time being as impalpable as the future but, unlike it, perceptible through memory, whatever sort of spiritual or physical phenomenon memory may one day prove to be."
"God bless my soul," the tooth-drawer declared, and then, upon due reflection, "yes, and yours as well."
"Yes," I said, "and mine as well."
On leaving his place of business, I truly believed all would be well, or as well as it might be for one with my notorious dental difficulties. The only cloud appearing upon the horizon of my imagination was the fear-no, not really the fear; say rather, the concern-that the tooth transplanted to my maxilla, whencever it first came, would weaken and abandon its adopted home. This showed no sign of eventuating. Indeed, as day followed day that tooth became attached ever more firmly to my jaw. Would that my own had been so tenacious of adhesion to the jawbone from which they sprang.
For some considerable while, then, all seemed well. No-again I misstate the plain truth, which is that for some considerable while all was well. Not everything was perfect; we speak of a man’s life, after all, not an angel’s. But all went as I would have hoped, or near enough. The most that occurred of an unusual-certainly not uncanny, not yet- -nature was that one or two or perhaps even several individuals imitated Vankirk the tooth-drawer in remarking upon what they perceived as an alteration to my accustomed forms of speech.