As I was riding with Tarleton towards Chelsea, one day, he asked me if I had ever seen the celebrated Mr. Salter. “No,” said I, “but I heard Steele talk of him the other night at Wills’s. He is an antiquarian and a barber, is he not?”
“Yes, a shaving virtuoso; really a comical and strange character, and has oddities enough to compensate one for the debasement of talking with a man in his rank.”
“Let us go to him forthwith,” said I, spurring my horse into a canter.
“Quod petis hic est,” cried Tarleton, “there is his house.” And my companion pointed to a coffee-house.
“What!” said I, “does he draw wine as well as teeth?”
“To be sure: Don Saltero is a universal genius. Let us dismount.”
Consigning our horses to the care of our grooms, we marched into the strangest-looking place I ever had the good fortune to behold. A long narrow coffee-room was furnished with all manner of things that, belonging neither to heaven, earth, nor the water under the earth, the redoubted Saltero might well worship without incurring the crime of idolatry. The first thing that greeted my eyes was a bull’s head, with a most ferocious pair of vulture’s wings on its neck. While I was surveying this, I felt something touch my hat; I looked up and discovered an immense alligator swinging from the ceiling, and fixing a monstrous pair of glass eyes upon me. A thing which seemed to me like an immense shoe, upon a nearer approach expanded itself into an Indian canoe; and a most hideous spectre with mummy skin, and glittering teeth, that made my blood run cold, was labelled, “Beautiful specimen of a Calmuc Tartar.”
While lost in wonder, I stood in the middle of the apartment, up walks a little man as lean as a miser, and says to me, rubbing his hands,—
“Wonderful, Sir, is it not?”
“Wonderful, indeed, Don!” said Tarleton; “you look like a Chinese Adam surrounded by a Japanese creation.”