Bald Heads

Bald Heads.

  If one may judge from the exceptional case of Elisha, baldness seems to the been considered a disgrace among the Jews in remote ages, still a disgrace which it was not permitted to reproach an honorable rain. The punishment inflicted by divine interposition, and at the express of the solicitation of the prophet, upon forty unfortunate children, seems to persons in the present day even, it may be added, to those who have lost their hair-rather severe. Lovers of analogies, be added, coincidences and contrasts may be invited to remark that the grease of wild beasts employed as instruments of vengeance against the little ones who taunted the good old prophet with his baldness was in later centuries to be employed as a capillary restorative.  The strength of Samson and the beauty of Absalom lay in their hair, and there is significance, no doubt, in the fact that through their hair both of them came to grief. Among the Greeks. the two most famous bald men were Aechylus and Ulysses. The baldness of Aechylus is known to have been the cause of his death, an eagle; a tortoise in its claws having dropped its prey with the view of breaking the shell upon what it took it be a rock, but which was in fact the shining skull of a great tragic poet. The baldness of Ulysses is commemorated in the "Odyssey," and the fearful vengeance taken on the suitors of Penelope seems to have been in a great measure due to the pleasantries in which one of them indulged concerning the glittering aspect presented by her husband's cranium. Baldness, however, was no more admired in those days than in our own;  and when Ulysses was restored to youth, stress is laid upon the fact most luxuriant kind were given back to him. Julius Caesar was notorious for his baldness, and the jokes made on this subject by his soldiers on the occasion of one of his triumphal entries into Rome are only too well known. Nor need the story be here repeated of the pleasure he took in a wreath which covered his denuded temples, and which, according; to one Roman historian, was his chief reason for valuing it. It may be remarked, however, that the like bust of Julius Caesar, in the British Museum, is not that of a man who in the present considered bald. The hair is not thick, and is brushed forward in a style which indicates a desire to make up for a certain want of hair in the region of the forehead and the temple. Something, however, must be allowed for the complimentary disposition of the sculptor reproducing the head of an all-powerful commander and ruler who was known to be without personal vanity. - Pall Mall Gazette.

   Scientific gent (with his hair on end and tassels of the cords to his dressing-gown thumping behind him as he descends the stairs): "Very strange! But I could almost swear- I hear footsteps-following me down  the stairs--!" Bolts into his bed-room, locks the door, and writes to the Athenaeum next day.

  He stood with his back against the front door of the street-car. Every one else had seats, and he had anxiously watched each face for symptoms of getting out for over three miles. It grew wearisome, and he finally shifted his weight from one foot to the other, and exclaimed: "Fur the love of the Lord, have none o' yes only homes to go to?" Then they all smiled, and the conductor tendered the ridge-pole of the rear platform.

  A young American, who has been in Paris for a year studying medicine, was visited by his father. Like a dutiful son, he parades his parental conscientiously through the city, and points out its architectural lions. Finally, they halt before a many-pillared building. "What is that lordly pile?" asks the old man. "I don't know," replies the youth;  "but there is a sergeant de ville." They cross over, and put the question. "That, gentleman," says the officer, "is the medical school."