They Mostly Pass Their Lives With Faces As
Smooth And Beardless As An Infant's. But Shaving Seems An
Instinct Of The Human Race; For Many Of These People, Having No
Hair To Take Off Their Faces, Shave Their Heads.
Others, however,
set resolutely to work to force nature to give them a beard.
One
of the chief cock-fighters at Dobbo was a Javanese, a sort of
master of the ceremonies of the ring, who tied on the spars and
acted as backer-up to one of the combatants. This man had
succeeded, by assiduous cultivation, in raising a pair of
moustaches which were a triumph of art, for they each contained
about a dozen hairs more than three inches long, and which, being
well greased and twisted, were distinctly visible (when not too
far off) as a black thread hanging down on each side of his
mouth. But the beard to match was the difficulty, for nature had
cruelly refused to give him a rudiment of hair on his chin, and
the most talented gardener could not do much if he had nothing to
cultivate. But true genius triumphs over difficulties. Although
there was no hair proper on the chin; there happened to be,
rather on one side of it, a small mole or freckle which contained
(as such things frequently do) a few stray hairs. These had been
made the most of. They had reached four or five inches in length,
and formed another black thread dangling from the left angle of
the chin.
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