This sort of thing has been going on ever since the first mammoth gold tooth was hung out as a bait to folks in search of a good time. (By the way, when did the present obnoxious system of dentistry begin?  It can’t be so very long ago that the electric auger was invented, and where would a dentist be without an electric auger?  Yet you never hear of Amalgam Filling Day, or any other anniversary in the dental year).  There must be a conspiracy of silence on the part of the trade to keep hidden the names of the men who are responsible for all this.

However many years it may be that dentists have been plying their trade, in all that time people have never tired of talking about their teeth.  This is probably due to the inscrutable workings of Nature who is always supplying new teeth to talk about.

As a matter of fact, the actual time and suffering in the chair is only a fraction of the gross expenditure connected with the affair.  The preliminary period, about which nobody talks, is much the worse.  This dates from the discovery of the wayward tooth and extends to the moment when the dentist places his foot on the automatic hoist which jacks you up into range.  Giving gas for tooth-extraction is all very humane in its way, but the time for anaesthetics is when the patient first decides that he must go to the dentist.  From then on, until the first excavation is started, should be shrouded in oblivion.

There is probably no moment more appalling than that in which the tongue, running idly over the teeth in a moment of care-free play, comes suddenly upon the ragged edge of a space from which the old familiar filling has disappeared.  The world stops and you look meditatively up to the corner of the ceiling.  Then quickly you draw your tongue away, and try to laugh the affair off, saying to yourself: 

“Stuff and nonsense, my good fellow!  There is nothing the matter with your tooth.  Your nerves are upset after a hard day’s work, that’s all.”

Having decided this to your satisfaction, you slyly, and with a poor attempt at being casual, slide the tongue back along the line of adjacent teeth, hoping against hope that it will reach the end without mishap.

But there it is!  There can be no doubt about it this time.  The tooth simply has got to be filled by someone, and the only person who can fill it with anything permanent is a dentist.  You wonder if you might not be able to patch it up yourself for the time being,—­a year or so—­perhaps with a little spruce-gum and a coating of new-skin.  It is fairly far back, and wouldn’t have to be a very sightly job.

But this has an impracticable sound, even to you.  You might want to eat some peanut-brittle (you never can tell when someone might offer you peanut-brittle these days), and the new-skin, while serviceable enough in the case of cream soups and custards, couldn’t be expected to stand up under heavy crunching.