THE TONSORIAL PARLOUR
but for my part I would willingly pay double to escape them. The essential part of the business, the actual shaving, is, as a rule, badly performed, with a heavy hand, and a good deal of needless pawing-about of the patient's head. But when the shave is over the horrors are only beginning. First, your whole face is cooked for several minutes in relays of towels steeped in boiling water. Then a long series of essences is rubbed into it, generally with the torturer's naked hand. The sequence of these essences varies in different "parlours," but one especially loathsome hell-brew, known as "witch-hazel," is everywhere inevitable. Then your wounds have to be elaborately doctored with stinging chemicals; your hair, which has been hopelessly touzled in the pawing process, has to be drenched in some sickly-smelling oil and brushed; your moustache has to be lubricated and combed; and at last you escape from the tormentor's clutches, irritated, enervated, hopelessly late for an important appointment, and so reeking with unholy odours that you feel as though all great Neptune's ocean would scarcely wash you clean again. Only once or twice have I submitted, out of curiosity, to the whole interminable process. I now cut it short, not without difficulty, before the "witch-hazel" stage is reached, and am regarded with blank astonishment and disapproval by the tonsorial professor, who feels his art and mystery insulted in his person, and is scarcely mollified by a ten-cent tip.
75
