"How much does the Professor set one back for a chart?" we inquired, as we toyed with the forty cents left out of our weekly envelope of the Saturday before. Two dollars for a reading and five dollars for a chart.
We stated firmly that we would have two dollars' worth, and that we would come for it at three o'clock in the afternoon. We were going to see this thing through if we had to hock something. As we bowed our adieu smilingly, the young lady pressed upon us one of the Professor's cards, in which we were advised to "get my new great chart and be helped—as many also numerous worried, etc., have—for life." On the back of the card there was more of the Prof's best phrenological English, which promised among much else that "marriage adaptions" would be explained. Immediately we resolved that we would see him that very day or expire in the effort.
We got there at three. The same blond and comely young woman let us in. Would we take off our hat and coat and sit in the parlor till the Professor got through examining the bumps on someone else's cranial arch? We would and we did. We sat down by a table on which there was a pile of calling cards—presumably left by grateful persons whose protuberances had been explained—and also a bound copy of the Professor's famous chart. We opened it and glanced through a few long passages on amativeness and combativeness and philoprogenitiveness and other polysyllabic characteristics, as indicated by convexities on the skull.
While we read there floated down to us from the mysterious regions above a rich Hibernian voice and the most superb brogue we had heard in many a long day. It was one of those thick, mashed-potatoes-and-buttermilk brogues which usually go with a semi-circular rim of reddish whiskers and a prehensile upper lip. We dropped the book and listened. We didn't pay any particular attention to what was being said—far be it from us to display an ungentlemanly curiosity as to the meaning of anyone else's bumps! We just listened to the voice. It made us think of St. Patrick ordering the snakes out of Ireland.
The voice came downstairs and accompanied someone to the front door. "Goodboy and good luck to yez both," said the voice—perhaps some cautious young man was having his fiancee's head studied—and then we were told that the Professor awaited us in his sanctum. We hastened out just in time to see a pair of short, thick legs scurrying upstairs ahead of us. We joined them in a neat little office at the top—where legs are usually joined—and found that they and the voice belonged to the Professor, in whose hands we had come prepared to place our head and a two-dollar bill.
The Professor looked us over, and we in turn gazed at him with the respectful and somewhat timid interest due to his professional insight into human character and destiny. But we must confess to a distinct disappointment. We had expected to see a large and impressive personage, with the face of a seer, piercing eyes, flowing locks—also a flowing robe, covered with cabalistic signs. We had expected him to be a sort of cross between a medicine man and an ancient alchemist. Instead we saw a round-faced, plump little Irishman, with close-cropped hair, a bristling mustache, and a decided leaning towards rotundity in the abdominal profile.
"Well, young man, and what can Oi do for ye?" asked the Professor, as though we might have come to get a tooth filled, or be measured for a new pair of pants.
We explained that we had come to have our head read, with a view to finding out what business in life we were best fitted for, and also to have our "marriage adaption" explained.
Without a word the Professor sat us in a chair in the middle of the room. Still without a word he seized a pair of callipers that were unpleasantly suggestive of ice-tongs. Then in ominous silence he proceeded to pick up our head by the ends, by the sides, by the front, by the back, under the ears, and in several other painful places where heads are not usually picked up. We felt as though our head were a block of ice, which was being carried up several long flights of stairs. And each time the Professor seized it in the tongs, he carefully scrutinized the scale at the top of them. Some measurements he took several times, either to verify them, or to make it plain that he was working hard on our case.
Having finished with the callipers, he drew out a tape and measured our head in more ways than we had ever thought possible—around the rim, over the dome, back of the ears, till we must have resembled a new real-estate sub-division. Only he didn't drive in any stakes. Finally he tilted our head back as far as it would go, and very solemnly measured us over the eyes to the point of the jaw on each side. This he did four or five times, gazing sternly at the tape each time like a judge warning a backward witness.