Bosjeman's head, or else I have to spend all the morning being dabbed about the face by a barber with damp hands. In either case it is a repulsive thing to have eating into one's time when one might be living, and I have calculated that all the hair I have lost in this way put end to end would reach to Berlin. All that vital energy thrown away! However, "Thorns and bristles shall it bring forth to thee;" I suppose it is part of the primal curse, and I try and stand it like a man. But the thing is a bother all the same.
Then after shaving comes the hunt for the collar-stud. Of all idiotic inventions the modern collar is the worst. A man who has to write things for such readers as mine cannot think overnight of where he puts his collar-stud; he has to keep his mind at an altogether higher level. Consequently he walks about the bedroom, thinking hard, and dropping things about: here a vest and there a collar, and sowing a bitter harvest against the morning. Or he sits on the edge of the bed jerking his garments this way and that. "I shot a slipper in the air," as the poet sings, and in the morning it turns up in the most impossible quarters, and where you least expect it. And, talking of going to bed, before Euphemia took the responsibility over I was always forgetting to wind my watch. But now that is one of the things she neglects.
Then after getting up there is breakfast. Autolycus of the Pall Mall Gazette may find heaven there, but I am differently constituted. There is, to begin with the essence of the offence—the stuff that has
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