at the eleventh hour every night breed poisonous vapors and
subtle megrims within my stomach, which humors, rising by their
natural courses to my brain, do therein produce a fever that
from within burneth up the fluids necessary to a healthy
condition of the capillary growth upon the super-adjacent and
exterior cranial integument.

Now, this very declaration of Miss Susan's gives me a potent
argument in defence of my practices, for, being bald, would not a
neglect of those means whereby warmth is engendered where it is
needed result in colds, quinsies, asthmas, and a thousand other
banes? The same benignant Providence which, according to
Laurence Sterne, tempereth the wind to the shorn lamb provideth
defence and protection for the bald. Had I not loved books, the
soul in my midriff had not done away with those capillary
vestiges of my simian ancestry which originally flourished upon
my scalp; had I not become bald, the delights and profits of
reading in bed might never have fallen to my lot.

And indeed baldness has its compensations; when I look about me
and see the time, the energy, and the money that are continually
expended upon the nurture and tending of the hair, I am thankful
that my lot is what it is. For now my money is applied to the
buying of books, and my time and energy are devoted to the
reading of them.

To thy vain employments, thou becurled and pomaded Absalom!
Sweeter than thy unguents and cosmetics and Sabean perfumes is
the smell of those old books of mine, which from the years and
from the ship's hold and from constant companionship with sages