suit. By Jove, but it's going to be a pretty trial!"

"That pleases me all right," I answered. "I've got to meet Ainsley
after the theatre and go over our new third act. I think you are going
to like it better than the old."

At the next station Old Hundred went out on the platform and hailed a
newsboy. "I want to see how the market closed," he explained, as he
buried himself in his paper.

[Illustration]

_Barber Shops of Yesterday_

I have just been to a barber shop,--not a city barber shop, where you
expect tiled floors and polished mirrors and a haughty Venus by a
table in the corner, who glances scornfully at your hands as you give
your hat, coat, and collar to a boy, as much as to say, "Manicures
himself!"--but a country barber shop, in a New England small town. I
rather expected that the experience would repay me, in awakened
pleasant memories, for a very poor hair-cut. Instead, I got a very
good hair-cut, and no pleasant memories were awakened at all; not,
that is, by the direct process of suggestion. I was only led to muse
on barber shops of my boyhood because this one was so different. Even
the barber was different. He chewed gum, he worked quickly, he used
shaving powder and took his cloths from a sterilizer, and finally he
held a hand-glass behind my head for me to see the result, quite like
his city cousins. (By the way, was ever a man so brave as to say the
cut _wasn't_ all right, when the barber held that hand-glass behind
his head? And what would the barber say if he did?) No, this shop was
antiseptic, and uninteresting. There was not even a picture on the
walls!

But, to the barber's soothing snip, snip, snip, and the gentle tug of
the comb, I dreamed of the barber shops of my boyhood, and of Clarkie
Parker's in particular. Clarkie's shop was in Lyceum Hall block, one
flight up--a huge room, with a single green upholstered barber's chair
between the windows, where one could sit and watch the town go by
below you. The room smelled pungently of bay rum. Barber shops don't
smell of bay rum any more. Around two sides were ranged many chairs
and an old leather couch. The chair-arms were smooth and black with
the rubbing of innumerable hands and elbows, and behind them, making a
dark line along the wall, were the marks where the heads of the
sitters rubbed as they tilted back. Nor can I forget the
spittoons,--large shallow boxes, two feet squar