theless is instantly filled with a burning
desire to equip you with a large number of other things. In this regard
the barbering profession has much in common with the haberdashering
or gents'-furnishing profession as practiced in our larger cities. You
invade a haberdashering establishment for the purpose, let us say, of
investing in a plain and simple pair of half hose, price twenty-five
cents. That emphatically is all that you do desire. You so state in
plain, simple language, using the shorter and uglier word socks.

Does the youth in the pale mauve shirt with the marquise ring on the
little finger of the left hand rest content with this? Need I answer
this question? In succession he tries to sell you a fancy waistcoat with
large pearl buttons, a broken lot of silk pajamas, a bath-robe, some
shrimp-pink underwear--he wears this kind himself he tells you in strict
confidence--a pair of plush suspenders and a knitted necktie that you
wouldn't be caught wearing at twelve o'clock at night at the bottom of
a coal mine during a total eclipse of the moon. If you resist his
blandishments and so far forget that you are a gentleman as to use harsh
language, and if you insist on a pair of socks and nothing else, he'll
let you have them, but he will never feel the same toward you as he did.

'Tis much the same with a barber. You need a shave in a hurry and he is
willing that you should have a shave, he being there for that purpose,
but first and last he can think of upward of thirty or forty other
things that you ought to have, including a shampoo, a hair cut, a hair
singe, a hair tonic, a hair oil, a manicure, a facial massage, a scalp
massage, a Turkish bath, his opinion on the merits of the newest White
Hope, a shoeshine, some kind of a skin food, and a series of comparisons
of the weather we are having this time this month with the weather we
were having this time last month. Not all of us are gifted with the
power of repartee by which my friend Frisbee turned the edge of the
barber's desires.

"Your hair," said the barber, fondling a truant lock, "is long."

"I know it is," said Frisbee. "I like it long. It's so Roycrofty."

"It is very long," said the barber with a wistful expression.

"I like it very long," said Frisbee. "I like to have people come up to
me on the street and call me Mr. Sutherland and ask me how I left
my sisters? I like to be mistaken for a Russian pianist. I like for
strangers to stop me and ask m