United States or Seychelles ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
As you may readily imagine, the amount of tonsorial operations indulged in by so dense a population call for an unlimited number of shavers and braiders of hair, albeit it is considered an employment of the lowest grade; but although the number of barbers is legion there are none who know how to cut hair until taught to do so by Europeans, so that in out-of-the-way places it is often very difficult to get the operation performed.
I will here mention the particulars of a trade I made for the barber's shop, while residing in the suburb. One day I traded for a small, handsome horse, and the following morning saddled him and went out for a horse-back ride. On my return I happened to stop in front of the barber shop, when the tonsorial artist asked how I'd trade my horse for the shop. "I'll leave it with you," was my reply.
He would seat himself at the window of the room he occupied over Silvester's tonsorial parlours and there chant lugubrious and tuneless ballads until morning, accompanying the noises by appropriate maltreatment of a jangling guitar. More magnanimous than Nero, he would thus give musical warning of the forthcoming municipal upheaval that Quicksand was scheduled to endure.
I had arranged with this tonsorial artist, whose shop was in the Strand near Northumberland House, that he should be prepared to remove these traces of disguise as speedily as he had put them on, and that I should leave a stylish coat and hat in his charge, to be donned in haste should occasion require. I next engaged two boys to stand opposite Northumberland House, and be ready to hold a horse.
No man was safe also who did not give his face a leonine aspect by wearing a mustache and sidewhiskers emblems, the one of "federalism," and the other of "independence." To possess a visage bare of these hirsute adornments or a countenance too efflorescent in that respect was, under a regime of tonsorial politics, to invite personal disaster!
Prison barbers are generally amateurs. Of course the officers are above such work, and unless a member of the tonsorial profession happens to be in residence, the scissors are wielded by the first man who fancies himself a natural adept at the business. The last barber I saw in Holloway Gaol was a coachman, whose only qualification for the work was that he had clipped horses' legs.
Every morning Rebolledo would leave the Corralon carrying a little bench and a wooden wall-bracket, from which hung a brass basin and a poster. Reaching a certain spot along the Americas fence he would attach the bracket and put up, beside it, a humorous sign the point of which, probably, he was the only one to see. It ran thus: MODERNIST TONSORIAL PARLOUR Antiseptic Barber Walk in Gents.
The captain said farewell; and we hunted up, by his direction, the New York Tonsorial Emporium. There we had five dollars' worth of various things done to us; after which we bought new clothes. The old ones we threw out into the street along with a vast collection of others contributed by our predecessors. "Now," said Johnny, "I feel like a new man.
We found the office closed; but, in the verandah of the dwelling-house, was a lady performing a tonsorial operation on the head of a prim-looking, elderly European, in a low, white cravat; the most domestic little scene I had witnessed since leaving home. Bent upon an interview with Wilson, the sailors now deputed the doctor to step forward as a polite inquirer after his health.
I learned that <i>that</i> horse had never before been driven by a woman. He evidently was not pleased. Soon the following appeared among the local items of interest in the Gooseville Clarion: Uriel Snooks, who has been working in the cheese factory at Frogville, is now to preside over chair number four in Baldwin's Tonsorial Establishment on Main Street. Kate Sanborn is trying another horse.
Word Of The Day