Bill Nye's Sparks

by Bill Nye

I will now return to the barber shop. It was a plain structure, with beautiful sarsaparilla pictures here and there on the walls and a faint odor of rancid pomatum and overworked hair restoratives.

There were three chairs richly upholstered in two-ply carpeting of some inflammatory hue, with large vines and the kind of flowers which grow on carpets but nowhere else. I have seen blossoms woven into ingrain carpets, varying in color from a dead black to the color of a hepatized lung, but I have never seen one that reminded me of anything I ever saw in nature. The chair I sat in also had springs in it. They were made of selections from the Washington monument.

The barber who waited on me asked me if I wanted a shave. A great many barbers ask me this during the year. Sometimes they do it from habit, and sometimes they do it to brighten up my life and bring a smile to my wan cheek. As I have no hair, the thinking mind naturally and by a direct course of reasoning arrives at the conclusion that when I go into a barber shop and climb into a chair, I do so for the purpose of getting shaved and not with the idea of having my fortune told or my deposition taken. Still barbers continue to ask me this question and look at each other with ill concealed mirth.

I said yes, I would like a shave unless he preferred to take my temperature, or amuse me by making a death mask of himself. He then began to strap a large razor with a double shuffle movement and to size me up at the same time.

He was a colored man, but he had lived in Washington a long time and knew a great deal more than he would if his lot had fallen elsewhere. He spoke with some feeling and fed me with about the most unpalatable lather I think I ever participated in. He also did an odd thing when he went for the second time over my face. I never have noticed the custom outside of that shop. Most barbers, in making the second trip over a customer's face, moisten one side at a time with a sponge or the damp hand as they go along, but in this case a large quantity of lather was put in my ear and, as he needed it, he took out what he required from time to time, using his finger like a paint brush and spreading on the lather as he went along. So accurately had he learned to measure the quantity of lather which an ear will hold that when he got through with me and I went away there was not over a tablespoonfnl in either ear and possibly not that much.

While I sat in the chair I heard a man, who seemed to be in about the third chair from me, saying that a certain bill numbered so-and-so had been referred to a certain committee and would undoubtedly by reported favorably. If so, it would in its regular order come up for discussion and reach a vote so-and-so. I was charmed with the man's knowledge of the condition of affairs in both houses and the exact status of all threatened legislation, because I always have to stop and think a good while before I can tell whether a bill originates on the floor of the house or in the rotunda.

I could not see this man, but I judged that he was a senator or sergeant-at-arms. He talked for some time about the condition of national affairs, and finally some one said something about evolution. I was perfectly wrapped up in what he was saying and remember distinctly how he referred to Herbert Spencer's definition of evolution as a change from indefinite, coherent heterogeneity through continuous differentiations and integrations.

When I arose from my chair and looked over that way I saw that the gentleman who had been talking on the condition of congressional legislation was a colored hotel porter of Washington, who was getting shaved in the third chair, and the man who was discussing the merits of evolution was the colored man who was shaving him.

Here in Washington the colored man has the air of one who is holding up one corner of the great national structure. Whether he is opening your soft boiled eggs for you in the morning, or putting bay rum on your nose, or checking your umbrella or brushing you with a wilted whisk broom, his thoughts are mostly upon national affairs. He is naturally an imitator wherever he goes, and this old resident of Washington has watched and studied the air and language of eminent statesmen so carefully that when he goes forth in the morning with his whitewashing portfolio on his arm he walks unconsciously like Senator Evarts or John James Ingalls. I saw a colored man taking a perpendicular lunch at the depot yesterday, and evidently the veteran Georgia senator is his model, for he cut his custard pie into large rectangular hunks and pushed it back behind his glottis with a caseknife, after which he drew in a saucerful of tea, with a loud and violent ways-and-means committee report which reminded me of the noise made by an unwearied cyclone trying to suck a cistern dry. I think that the colored man exaggerated the imitation somewhat, but he was evidently trying to assume the table manners of Senator Brown of Georgia.

For this reason, if for no other, members of the cabinet, senators, representatives, judges and heads of departments cannot be too careful in their daily walk and conversation. Unconsciously they are molding the customs, the manners, and the styles of dress which are to become the customs, the manners, and the dress of a whole race. If I could to-day take our statesmen all apart, not so much for the purpose of examining their works, but so that we could be alone and talk this matter over by ourselves, I would strive in my poor, weak, faltering way to impress upon them the awful responsibility which rests upon them not only as polite and fluent conversationalists, classical and courteous debators. speaking pieces for the benefit of future conventions, of referring to each other as liars, traitors, thieves, deserters, bummers, beats, and great moral abscesses on the body politic; rehearsing campaign speeches in congress at an expense of $20 per day each, and meantime obstructing wholesome tariff legislation, but as the conservators of etiquette, statesmanship, and morality for a race of people the great responsibility for whose welfare still rests upon us as a nation.