That was just what Mr Smith's hairdresser had told him for nothing, though, certainly, with sundry ideas _in petto_ that it might fall to his task to make this wig; but Mr Smith had expected something else from a man who put MD at the end of his name. "Too big for his profession," said Mr Smith, and he bought a pot of the Count de Caput Medusae's Golden Balm, prepared from the original recipe given by that inventive Count to the aunt's cousin's uncle of the proprietor. "Try another pot, sir," said the vendor, examining the bare head with a powerful magnifying glass. "Perfect down on the surface, sir, though not plain to the naked eye. I should advise the large twenty-two shilling pots, sir, and the vigorous rubbing in, to be continued night and morning." But if there had been any down it knew better than to stop and suffer the scrubbing inflicted by Mr Smith upon his bare poll, and a month only found him with the scalp turned from waxy-white to pinky-red, while his head was sore to a degree. "Jackal's formula produces hair, beard, or whiskers upon the smoothest skin." But, perhaps, Mr Smith's was not the smoothest skin, but not for want of rubbing and polishing, and the formula did not produce anything but a great many naughty words, while "Brimstone Degenerator," "The Capillary Attraction," and a score of other things, only made holes in several five-pound notes, while Mr Smith, unable to discover any more filaments issuing from the surface of his scalp from bulbous radices, came to the conclusion that he really must have a wig. He had it; and found it light and warm, and tried to make himself believe that it could not be told from the real thing. He would brush it before the glass, or run his hands through the curls when any one was looking, and pretend to scratch his head, but the brute of a thing would slip on one side, or get down over his forehead, or go back, or do something stupid, as if of impish tendencies and exclaiming to the world at large, "I'm a wig, I am!" Brushed up carefully was that wig every now and then by the maker, who would send it back glossed and pomatumed to a wonderful degree of perfection; when again Mr Smith would try and persuade himself that with such a skin parting no one could fail to be deceived, but the people found him out when he lost his hat from a puff of wind, which jumped it off and sent it rolling along the pavement. We have most of us chased our hats upon a windy day, now getting close up, now being left behind, and have tried, as is the correct thing, to smile; but who could smile if the pomatum had adhered to the lining of the hat, and he was scudding under a bare pole in chase of hat and wig. After that episode in his life, Mr Smith brushed up his wig himself, and always used oil; while he found his wig decidedly economical, for it never wanted cutting.