Englishmen, as a rule, shave themselves when they do not wear beards.  The author of the little pamphlet before us gives a dozen curious hints which prove the difficulty of the art.  Almost all razors, he seems to think, were “made to sell.”  He suggests that razors of tried and trusty character, razors whose public form can be depended upon, should be purchased of barbers.  But it is not every barber who will part with such possessions.  Razors are like Scotch sheep dogs; no one would keep a bad one, or sell, or give away a good one.  Coelebs did not find the quest of a wife more arduous than all men find that of a really responsible razor.  You may be unlucky in the important matter of lather.  For soap our author gives a recipe which reminds one of Walton’s quaint prescriptions and queer preparations.  Shaving soap should be made at home, it seems, and the mystery of its manufacture is here disclosed.  The only way to keep razors “set” is to persevere in sending them to various barbers till the genius who can “set” them to your hand is discovered.  Perhaps he lives at Aleppo; perhaps, like the father of a heroine of comic song, at Jerusalem.  Till he is discovered the shaver wins no secure happiness, and in the search for the barber who has an elective affinity for the shaver may be found material for an operetta or an epic.  The shaver figures as a sort of Alastor, seeking the ideal setter of razors, as Shelley’s Alastor sought ideal beauty in the neighbourhood of Afghanistan, and in the very home of the Central Asian Question.  No razor should be condemned till it has been “stropped” well and carefully.  And this brings us to the great topic of strops.  Some say that soldiers’ old buff belts make the best strops.  The Scotch peasantry use a peculiar hard smooth fungus which grows in decaying elm trees.  Our author has heard that “Government now demands the return of” the old buff belts.  Government cannot want them all for its own use, and perhaps will see to it that old buff strops once more find an open market.  In the lack of old buff belts, you may mix up tallow and the ashes of burnt newspaper, and smear this unctuous compound on the strop.  People who neglect these “tips,” and who are clumsy, like most of us, may waste a forty-eighth part of their adult years in shaving.  This time is worth economizing, and with a little forethought, an ideal razor-setter, tallow, buff belts, burnt newspapers, and the rest, we may shave in five minutes daily.

STREET NOISES.

“If any calm, a calm despair,” is the portion of people who would like to reform, that is to abolish, the street noises of London.  These noises are constantly commented upon with much freedom in the columns of various contemporaries.  Nor is this remarkable, for persons who are occupied with what is called “brainwork,” are peculiarly sensitive to the disturbances of the streets.  Sometimes they cannot sleep till morning, sometimes