You stand in the sunlight and waggle your fingers and you are struck with the desirable glitter that flits from finger tip to finger tip like a heleograph winking on a mountain top. It is indeed a pleasing spectacle. You decide that hereafter you will always glitter so. It is cheaper than wearing diamonds and much more refined, and so you take good care of your fingers all that day and carefully refrain from dipping them in the brine while engaged in the well known indoor sport of spearing for dill pickles at the business men"s lunch.
But the next morning when you wake up the desirable glitter is gone.
You only glimmer dully--your fingers do not sparkle and dazzle and scintillate as they did. As Francois Villon, the French poet would undoubtedly have said had manicures been known at the time he was writing his poems, "Where are the manicures of yesterday?" instead of making it, "Where are the snows of yesteryear?" there being no answer ready for either question, except that the manicures of yesterday like the snows of yesteryear are never there when you start looking for them.
They have just naturally got up and gone away, leaving no forwarding address.
You have now been launched upon your career as a manicuree. You never get over it. You either get married and your wife does your nails for you, thus saving you large sums of money, but failing to impart the high degree of polish and the spice of romance noticed in connection with the same job when done away from home, or you continue to patronize the regular establishments and become known in time as Polished Percival, the Pet of the Manicure Parlor. But in either event your hands which once were hands and nothing more, have become a source of added trouble and expense to you.
Speaking of hands naturally brings one to the subject of feet, which was intended originally to be the theme for the last half of this chapter, but unfortunately I find I have devoted so much s.p.a.ce to your hands that there is but little room left for your feet and so far as your feet are concerned, we must content ourselves on this occasion with a few general statements.
Feet, I take it, speaking both from experience and observation, are even more trouble to us than hands are. There are still a good many of us left who go through life without doing anything much for our hands but with our feet it is different. They thrust themselves upon us so to speak, demanding care and attention. This goes for all sizes and all ages of feet. From the time you are a small boy and suffer from stone bruises in the summer and chilblains in the winter, on through life you"re beset with corns and callouses and falling of the instep and all the other ills that feet are heir to.
The rich limp with the gout, the moderately well to do content themselves with an active ingrown nail or so, and the poor man goes out and drops an iron casting on his toe. Nearly every male who lives to reach the voting age has a period of mental weakness in his youth when he wears those pointed shoes that turn up at the ends, like sleigh runners; and spends the rest of his life regretting it. Feet are certainly ungrateful things. I might say that they are proverbially ungrateful. You do for them and they do you. You get one corn, hard or soft, cured up or removed bodily and a whole crowd of its relatives come to take its place. I imagine that Nature intended we should go barefooted and is now getting even with us because we didn"t. Our poor, painful feet go with us through all the years and every step in life is marked by a pang of some sort. And right on up to the end of our days, our feet are getting more infirm and more troublesome and more crotchety and harder to bear with all the time. How many are there right now who have one foot in the grave and the other at the chiropodist"s?
Thousands, I reckon.
Napoleon said an army traveled on its stomach. I don"t blame the army, far from it; I"ve often wished I could travel that way myself, and I"ve no doubt so has every other man who ever crowded a number nine and three-quarters foot into a number eight patent-leather shoe, and then went to call on friends residing in a steam-heated apartment. As what man has not? Once the green-corn dance was an exclusive thing with the Sioux Indians, but it may now be witnessed when one man steps on another man"s toes in a crowd.
We are accustomed to make fun of the humble worm of the dust but in one respect the humble worm certainly has it on us. He goes through existence without any hands and any feet to bother him. Indeed in this regard I can think of but one creature in all creation who is worse off than we poor humans are. That is the lowly ear wig. Think of being an ear wig, that suffers from fallen arches himself and has a wife that suffers from cold feet!