take the only vacant chair, the one presided over by the best barber.  It always happens so.  I sat down, hoping that I might fall heir to the chair belonging to the better of the remaining two barbers, for he had already begun combing his man’s hair, while his comrade was not yet quite done rubbing up and oiling his customer’s locks.  I watched the probabilities with strong interest.  When I saw that No. 2 was gaining on No. 1 my interest grew to solicitude.  When No. 1 stopped a moment to make change on a bath ticket for a new-comer, and lost ground in the race, my solicitude rose to anxiety.  When No. 1 caught up again, and both he and his comrade were pulling the towels away and brushing the powder from their customers’ cheeks, and it was about an even thing which one would say “Next!” first, my very breath stood still with the suspense.  But when at the culminating moment No. 1 stopped to pass a comb a couple of times through his customer’s eyebrows, I saw that he had lost the race by a single instant, and I rose indignant and quitted the shop, to keep from falling into the hands of No. 2; for I have none of that enviable firmness that enables a man to look calmly into the eyes of a waiting barber and tell him he will wait for his fellow-barber’s chair.

I stayed out fifteen minutes, and then went back, hoping for better luck.  Of course all the chairs were occupied now, and four men sat waiting, silent, unsociable, distraught, and looking bored, as men always do who are waiting their turn in a barber’s shop.  I sat down in one of the iron-armed compartments of an old sofa, and put in the time far a while reading the framed advertisements of all sorts of quack nostrums for dyeing and coloring the hair.  Then I read the greasy names on the private bayrum bottles; read the names and noted the numbers on the private shaving-cups in the pigeonholes; studied the stained and damaged cheap prints on the walls, of battles, early Presidents, and voluptuous recumbent sultanas, and the tiresome and everlasting young girl putting her grandfather’s spectacles on; execrated in my heart the cheerful canary and the distracting parrot that few barbers’ shops are without.  Finally, I searched out the least dilapidated of last year’s illustrated papers that littered the foul center-table, and conned their unjustifiable misrepresentations of old forgotten events.

At last my turn came.  A voice said “Next!” and I surrendered to—­No. 2, of course.  It always happens so.  I said meekly that I was in a hurry, and it affected him as strongly as if he had never heard it.  He shoved up my head, and put a napkin under it.  He plowed his fingers into my collar and fixed a towel there.  He explored my hair with his claws and suggested that it needed trimming.  I said I did not want it trimmed.  He explored again and said it was pretty long for the present style—­better have a little taken off; it needed it behind especially.  I said I had had it cut only a week before.  He