Rensselaer Union, Volume 7, Number 25, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 11 March 1875 — Mark Twain on a Dentist’s Shop. [ARTICLE]

Mark Twain on a Dentist’s Shop.

Mask Twain, in his new book about England, tells how he had the toothache one night in London, and gives some pleasing recollections of the dentist’s shop which he was wont to patronize when he lived in Elmira. He says: “One night that tooth did jump and every time it jumped it raised my head right off the pillow. How I aid .lie awake and think about that dentist’s shop in Elmira, where I had been under torture so many times—of those pretty dental instruments so polished and so cold! How I did long to lay my cheek against one—one of those snort, thick, heavy, twisted chaps, with the bowlegged, fluted and curved handles and short, hawk’s-bill jaws. How I reveled in delight at the thought of* having such a thing clutch my refractory tooth and ‘ yank it!’ With what pleasurable emotions came crowding into my mind the recollections of that dentist and his room and its fixtures—his big easychair, with the pretty white-curtained window before it, and the nice, big, redglass spittoon to the left, with the hole in the bottom, and the bits of wet cotton and the bright pieces of gold and streams of blood-stained saliva on the sides. And then the pretty little bureau, with the bottles on the top, and the little yellow drawers which he jerks out so gently when seeking for some new and more delicate instrument of torture. And then the beautiful little round, velvetcovered stand on the gas fixture, covered with the nice drills and pretty files, and the lovely little crowbars with the stained ivory handles, and the long steel crochet needle with which he hunts for new cavities, and the little round pasteboard box full of gold ‘ plugs,’ and the dirty little napkin and the rubber ball syringe, and the singular smell of his thumb, and all that! Oh; how nice!” Veils are new made of bits of white tulle trimmed with narrow Valenciennes or Mechlin edging. They aje bad for the eyes, seldom becoming save to the freshest of faces and rarely live through halt a dozen wearings. Therefore they cam hardly be considered nrofltable.