And when the damned quack got to work, whoever he was that time, it would hurt worse than anything you can think of. If he grabs a tooth with the pincers, and instead of pulling it he breaks it, and he has to jerk out all the fragments one at a time, what else is it going to do? I ask you, my friends, what else can it possibly do?

I tell you frankly, I was more relieved than sorry when I lost the last tooth down below-ten years ago it was now. My bottom false teeth fit tolerably well, and I don’t mind ‘em a bit. But I wanted to hang on to the ones I have up top. I still do want that, as a matter of fact. If you have a full plate up there, they hold in your uppers with springs, and that is another infernal invention. There are plenty of ways I would like to be like George Washington, but that is not one of them.

But God does what He wants, not what you want. Not what I want, either. About six months ago, it was, when one of my top left bicuspids went off like it had a fire lit inside it.

What’s a bicuspid? On each side, top and bottom, you have got two teeth betwixt your eyeteeth and your grinders. Ask a dentist, and he will tell you they’re bicuspids. I have done a powerful lot of palavering with dentists over the years. I know how they talk. I am a man who likes to learn things. I want to find out just precisely what they are going to inflict on me before they go and inflict it.

And a whole fat lot of good that has done me, too.

I kept hoping the toothache would go away. Might as well hope the bill collector or your mother-in-law will go away. You stand a better chance. Before long, I knew it was time to get me to a dentist-that or go plumb out of my mind, one. I had not had to lose a chopper for five or six years before that. The last quack I had gone to was out of business. Maybe the folks he tormented strung him up. I can hope so, anyhow.

So I found me another fellow, a Dutchman named Vankirk. He grinned when he saw my poor sorry mouth. His teeth, damn him, were as white as if he soaked ‘em in cat piss every night. For all I know, maybe he did.