And so the beard is coming in fashion again. Consoling thought to you of the fertile facial soil and with ugly contour or ungainly blemishes to conceal, but distressing to those chubby-faced, masculine beauties whose tender skins will not yield a plentiful crop. But, you have had your day, oh, ye of the germ-proof, Napoleonic countenance; so, discard your Gillettes, and make way for his majesty--The Beard. The halcyon days of the razor are no more, if we are to believe fickle Dame Fashion, and we are now to welcome the day of the shears. If nature has been stingy, and that glorious excrescence, the beard, is impossible to you, mon cher, pray accept our sympathy; but, please be generous enough to take the inevitable with good grace, and not worry us with foolish arguments about bearded barbarians and unsanitary savages. We know that you can make a strong case against the beard, but we imagine we can make one equally strong in its favor. All of your progenitors had them, including Adam--if we are to believe the ancient monuments, all of which show those gentlemen with a bushy beard of no mean dimensions. You say the ancient Egyptians wore no beards? Yes, but please observe that on occasions of high festivity, they wore false beards as assertions of their dignity and virility, and always represented their male deities with splendid hirsute adornments tip-tilted at the ends. It is true that they called the Greeks and Romans "barbarians" (bearded, unshaven, savages), and that about 300 B. C., the latter began to shave and in turn to call other peoples "barbarians"; but these incidents were only passing fancies, freaks and fashions soon to make way for the approaching, persistent reign of the beard. You say that Julian argued arduously against the beard? Yes, but would you take for a model a man whose whole body was bearded, and who prided himself on his long finger-nails and on the inky blackness of his hands? And don't forget that the reason Alexander abolished beards in his army was one that hardly fits your case, for was it not because the enemy had a habit of using the beard as a handle, much to the inconvenience--to say nothing of the discomfort--of the victim?