I sat bolt upright, silent, sad, and solemn.  One of the wig-making villains lathered my face for ten terrible minutes and finished by plastering a mass of suds into my mouth.  I expelled the nasty stuff with a strong English expletive and said, “Foreigner, beware!” Then this outlaw strapped his razor on his boot, hovered over me ominously for six fearful seconds, and then swooped down upon me like the genius of destruction.  The first rake of his razor loosened the very hide from my face and lifted me out of the chair.  I stormed and raved, and the other boys enjoyed it.  Their beards are not strong and thick.  Let us draw the curtain over this harrowing scene.

Suffice it that I submitted and went through with the cruel infliction of a shave by a French barber; tears of exquisite agony coursed down my cheeks now and then, but I survived.  Then the incipient assassin held a basin of water under my chin and slopped its contents over my face, and into my bosom, and down the back of my neck, with a mean pretense of washing away the soap and blood.  He dried my features with a towel and was going to comb my hair, but I asked to be excused.  I said, with withering irony, that it was sufficient to be skinned—­I declined to be scalped.

I went away from there with my handkerchief about my face, and never, never, never desired to dream of palatial Parisian barber-shops anymore.  The truth is, as I believe I have since found out, that they have no barber shops worthy of the name in Paris—­and no barbers, either, for that matter.  The impostor who does duty as a barber brings his pans and napkins and implements of torture to your residence and deliberately skins you in your private apartments.  Ah, I have suffered, suffered, suffered, here in Paris, but never mind—­the time is coming when I shall have a dark and bloody revenge.  Someday a Parisian barber will come to my room to skin me, and from that day forth that barber will never be heard of more.

At eleven o’clock we alighted upon a sign which manifestly referred to billiards.  Joy!  We had played billiards in the Azores with balls that were not round and on an ancient table that was very little smoother than a brick pavement—­one of those wretched old things with dead cushions, and with patches in the faded cloth and invisible obstructions that made the balls describe the most astonishing and unsuspected angles and perform feats in the way of unlooked-for and almost impossible “scratches” that were perfectly bewildering.  We had played at Gibraltar with balls the size of a walnut, on a table like a public square—­and in both instances we achieved far more aggravation than amusement.  We expected to fare better here, but we were mistaken.  The cushions were a good deal higher than the balls, and as the balls had a fashion of always stopping under the cushions, we accomplished very little in the way of caroms.  The cushions were hard and unelastic, and the cues were so crooked that in making