r; and the results were wonderfully different from those produced
by the people who brushed one's boyish hair in the good old times.

"Oh! for the days when I was young!" people cry, and they may well make
use of that interjection; but it ought to be in something else than
regret.

I, for one, would prefer not to be young again, to go through all that
suffering connected with my head.

Pray, do not imagine that I refer to learning the three "R's" or to
working out those angular puzzles invented by Euclid, whose problems
would only stop in my brain one at a time--that is to say, when I had
mastered one perfectly, and could repeat and illustrate it throughout
upon slate with pencil, upon paper with pen, upon blackboard with chalk,
the process of acquiring another made a clean sweep of the first, which
was utterly demolished and had to be relearned, only in its turn to
destroy "Proposition Two."

I meant nothing of that sort, but rather the external suffering that my
unfortunate little head received at the hands of nurses, who
half-suffocated me with the soap that produced temporary blindness in my
eyes, and deafness in my ears, before the best family yellow or mottled
was "slooshed" away, leaving me panting and hot. Then came the
tremendous rubbing, followed by the jigging out of knots of hair with a
cruel comb and the brushing which seemed to make numberless little holes
in my tender scalp; while my head was knocked to this side and to that,
and then tapped with the back of the brush, because I was a naughty boy
and would not hold still.

Lieutenant Lacey's treatment at the hands of Jerry Brigley was of a very
different type. When he was shampooing, Jerry could have given
Cinquevalli, the great juggler, long odds and beaten him. This man
performs wonderful feats with cannon-balls, but they are nothing to
Jerry's graceful acts with the human head, which he would take in hand
and keep in a perfect state of equilibrium, balancing the pressure of
one set of fingers by the resistance of the other; the same when
towelling, and, above all, when finishing with a pair of the
lieutenant's ivory-backed brushes. His master's head was kept floating,
as it were, on the points of the bristles, while a pleasant stimulation
was kept up on what Jerry termed "the scallup."

"By the way, Brigley," said the lieutenant, who sat back in his chair,
with his eyes half-shut, "I shall have three or four friends here
to-night."

"Yes,