barber made one more effort.

"Say," he said in my ear, as a thing concerning himself and me alone,
"your hair's pretty well all falling out. You'd better let me just
shampoo up the scalp a bit and stop up them follicles or pretty soon you
won't--"

"No, thank you," I said, "not to-day."

This was all the barber could stand. He saw that I was just one of those
miserable dead-beats who come to a barber shop merely for a shave, and
who carry away the scalp and the follicles and all the barber's
perquisites as if they belonged to them.

In a second he had me thrown out of the chair.

"Next," he shouted.

As I passed down the line of the barbers, I could see contempt in every
eye while they turned on the full clatter of their revolving shampoo
brushes and drowned the noise of my miserable exit in the roar of
machinery.

_PARISIAN PASTIMES_

_I.--The Advantages of a Polite Education_

"TAKE it from me," said my friend from Kansas, leaning back in his seat
at the Taverne Royale and holding his cigar in his two fingers--"don't
talk no French here in Paris. They don't expect it, and they don't seem
to understand it."

This man from Kansas, mind you, had a right to speak. He _knew_ French.
He had learned French--he told me so himself--_good_ French, at the
Fayetteville Classical Academy. Later on he had had the natural method
"off" a man from New Orleans. It had cost him "fifty cents a throw." All
this I have on his own word. But in France something seemed to go wrong
with his French.

"No," he said reflectively, "I guess what most of them speak here is a
sort of patois."

When he said it was a patois, I knew just what he meant. It was
equivalent to saying that he couldn't understand it.

I had seen him strike patois before. There had been a French steward on
the steamer coming over, and the man from Kansas, after a couple of
attempts, had said it was no use talking French to that man. He spoke a
hopeless patois. There were half a dozen cabin passengers, too,
returning to their homes in France. But we soon found from listening to
their conversation on deck that what they were speaking was not French
but some sort of patois.

It was the same thing coming through Normandy. Patois, everywhere, not a
word of French--not a single sentence of the real language, in the way
they had it at Fayetteville. We stopped off a day at Rouen to look at
the cathedral. A sort of abbot showed us round. Would you beli