excitement among those two barbers! There was a wild consultation, and
afterwards a hurrying to and fro and a feverish gathering up of razors
from obscure places and a ransacking for soap. Next they took us into a
little mean, shabby back room; they got two ordinary sitting-room chairs
and placed us in them with our coats on. My old, old dream of bliss
vanished into thin air!

I sat bolt upright, silent, sad, and solemn. One of the wig-making
villains lathered my face for ten terrible minutes and finished by
plastering a mass of suds into my mouth. I expelled the nasty stuff with
a strong English expletive and said, "Foreigner, beware!" Then this
outlaw strapped his razor on his boot, hovered over me ominously for six
fearful seconds, and then swooped down upon me like the genius of
destruction. The first rake of his razor loosened the very hide from my
face and lifted me out of the chair. I stormed and raved, and the other
boys enjoyed it. Their beards are not strong and thick. Let us draw the
curtain over this harrowing scene.

Suffice it that I submitted and went through with the cruel infliction of
a shave by a French barber; tears of exquisite agony coursed down my
cheeks now and then, but I survived. Then the incipient assassin held a
basin of water under my chin and slopped its contents over my face, and
into my bosom, and down the back of my neck, with a mean pretense of
washing away the soap and blood. He dried my features with a towel and
was going to comb my hair, but I asked to be excused. I said, with
withering irony, that it was sufficient to be skinned--I declined to be
scalped.

I went away from there with my handkerchief about my face, and never,
never, never desired to dream of palatial Parisian barber-shops anymore.