The Manitowoc pilot. [volume] (Manitowoc, Wis.) 1859-1932, 1885-10-29
THE DYED BEARD.

A man with naturally pink or old
gold beard, or one with a facial head
OF hair that has become bleached by
the accumulated dews of years of piety.
may command public regard, but when
he dyes his beard, he ceases to be an
object of human esteem. He falls from
ms pedestal and his chin disappears in
the mire of popular sickness at the
public stomach.
1t is a mistake to attempt to set ma
ture oaca twenty or thirty years or get
ahead Of it ten or fifteen years by the
use OF tannic acid and nitrate of silver
in solution, and the man who does so
is bound to sooner or later become an
object Of general irony. When on Sat
urday evening he emerges from the
office of q E9ir-carpenter with shin
ing black beard and red or tlaxen hair,
the observant multitude can not help
thinking that his face is not in harmo-
ny with the rest of his hcad;5 and that
one of these days his whiskers will be
detected in some sort of mischief by
the roach pasted down over his al
ready narrow brow and be delivered up
to Justice. If man has the misfor-
tune TO own a head of coa,-black hair
and a beard of shimmering moonlight,
he is excusable for trying to average
up his appearance, but when both his
hair and beard are white with birth or
long standing and he dopes his beard
into rank antagonism with his COM
plexion, ne creates the same impress
sion he would be likely to create if he
were to borrow q set of stencils and
print the words: 'I am a blamed
fool, in flaming letters across his
bulging brow.
There is something deeply pathetic
in the efforts of a cailow youth to force
the baccilli on his lip to germinate and
bloom forth into tiercely raging
moustache. 1t always reminds me of
the efforts of the sower to make seed
grow in stony ground, and then he
thinks his moustache has arrived when
it is away down the road, and rubs
some dye on the place where he eX-
poets it to locate, and in about two
weeks, when it begins to scale of, he
looks as if somebody had struck him
on the snoot with a handful of freckles
and stuck some of them fast. The
deluded seeker after hair then shaves
off his freckles and goes about smiling
broadly and expecting people to re-
mark upon his odd appearance, when
he will proudly tell them that he has
shaved off his moustache, and in about
ten years they will discover that per-
haps he did not lie to them in intimat-
ing that he had one.
When the full-grown man dyes his
beard to make him look young, how
ever, he becomes Il standing rebuile to
himself. 1t looks all right on Satur-
day evening, when he comes out OF the
shop where they have rejuvenated him,
but by Sunday evening there is q short
section of white next to the skin on ev-
cry hair, and in about twelve minutes,
the young lady he is trying to deceive,
will stroke his whiskers and examine
them closely, and then get the sulks
and then go to flirting with the man at
the window across the street while he
gets naQ ana ieelS neglected because
She does not notice him when he winks
at her. He never for a moment thinks
that his white eyebrows have an insin-
cere look about them to which he calls
her attention by winking, and when
she holds him at arms length at part
inc and laughs in his face when he
says:
My darling, am dying for kiss, !"
he can not well avoid feeling that she
is inclined to believe him.
1t must make a man with an artiti-
cially coiored beard feel peculiarly sad
to ear the queen of his heart and an
gel E his soul, besides the life of his
love and the sugar OF his existence re-
marx as she runs her eye along the
borders OF his beard:
"My love, the best thing you can do
is to hunt out 4 cool, sequestered spot
and dye" 1t must rack his being with
a fear that, while she may not wish to
be entirely rid of him, she would pre-
fer to have him come to her i'll the more
attractive form OF 4 consistent and
well behaved corpse Through Mail
AdQaz3C.