After dinner we felt like seeing such Parisian specialties as we might see without distressing exertion, and so we sauntered through the brilliant streets and looked at the dainty trifles in variety stores and jewelry shops.  Occasionally, merely for the pleasure of being cruel, we put unoffending Frenchmen on the rack with questions framed in the incomprehensible jargon of their native language, and while they writhed we impaled them, we peppered them, we scarified them, with their own vile verbs and participles.

We noticed that in the jewelry stores they had some of the articles marked “gold” and some labeled “imitation.”  We wondered at this extravagance of honesty and inquired into the matter.  We were informed that inasmuch as most people are not able to tell false gold from the genuine article, the government compels jewelers to have their gold work assayed and stamped officially according to its fineness and their imitation work duly labeled with the sign of its falsity.  They told us the jewelers would not dare to violate this law, and that whatever a stranger bought in one of their stores might be depended upon as being strictly what it was represented to be.  Verily, a wonderful land is France!

Then we hunted for a barber-shop.  From earliest infancy it had been a cherished ambition of mine to be shaved some day in a palatial barber-shop in Paris.  I wished to recline at full length in a cushioned invalid chair, with pictures about me and sumptuous furniture; with frescoed walls and gilded arches above me and vistas of Corinthian columns stretching far before me; with perfumes of Araby to intoxicate my senses and the slumbrous drone of distant noises to soothe me to sleep.  At the end of an hour I would wake up regretfully and find my face as smooth and as soft as an infant’s.  Departing, I would lift my hands above that barber’s head and say, “Heaven bless you, my son!”

So we searched high and low, for a matter of two hours, but never a barber-shop could we see.  We saw only wig-making establishments, with shocks of dead and repulsive hair bound upon the heads of painted waxen brigands who stared out from glass boxes upon the passer-by with their stony eyes and scared him with the ghostly white of their countenances.  We shunned these signs for a time, but finally we concluded that the wig-makers must of necessity be the barbers as well, since we could find no single legitimate representative of the fraternity.  We entered and asked, and found that it was even so.

I said I wanted to be shaved.  The barber inquired where my room was.  I said never mind where my room was, I wanted to be shaved—­there, on the spot.  The doctor said he would be shaved also.  Then there was an 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!