CHAPTER V
THE TALE OF THE WANDERING BOOK-CASE
(As Told in the Smoking Room of the Hoch Der Kaiser on the Last Night at Sea.)
AT one time I was keenly interested in collecting, as a sort of side issue, locks or clippings from the whiskers of famous men. It was a pursuit which I later forsook in favor of my more valuable and elaborate collections of whisker portraits, but in the course of several years I had acquired fragments of the beards or whiskers of nearly every man of national importance at home and abroad. Some were given me by their owners, others were obtained by bribing their barbers, while a few came to me by means not so scrupulous.
I was unhappy, however, because my collection lacked a souvenir snipped from the royal
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