they speak to the best of their experience. I’ve heard tell of barbers, woman, about London, that rode up this street, and down that other street, in coaches and four, jumping out to every one that halooed to them, sharping razors both on stone and strap, at the ransome of a penny the pair; and shaving off men’s beards, whiskers and all, stoop and roop, for a three-ha’pence. Speak of barbers! it’s all ye ken about it. Commend me to a safe employment, and a profitable. They may give others a nick, and draw blood, but catch them hurting themselves. They are not exposed to colds and rheumatics, from east winds and rainy weather; for they sit, in white aprons, plaiting hair into wigs for auld folks that have bell-pows, or making false curls for ladies that would fain like to look smart in the course of nature. And then they go from house to house, like gentlemen in the morning; cracking with Maister this or Madam that, as they soap their chins with scented-soap, or put their hair up in marching order either for kirk or playhouse. Then at their leisure, when they’re not thrang at home, they can pare corns to the gentry, or give ploughmen’s heads the bicker-cut for a penny, and the hair into the bargain for stuffing chairs with; and between us, who knows—many rottener ship has come to land—but that some genty Miss, fond of plays, poems, and novels, may fancy our Benjie when he is giving her red hair a twist with the torturing irons, and run away with
him, almost whether he will or not, in a stound of unbearable love!”
Here making an end of my discourse, and halting to draw breath, I looked Nanse broad in the face, as much as to say, “Contradict me if ye daur,” and, “What think ye of that now?”—The man is not worth his lugs, that allows his wife to be maister; and being by all laws, divine and human, the head of the house, I aye made a rule of keeping my putt good. To be candid, howsoever, I must take leave to confess, that Nanse, being a reasonable woman, gave me but few opportunities of exerting my authority in this way. As in other matters, she soon came, on reflection, to see the propriety of what I had been saying and setting forth. Besides, she had such a motherly affection towards our bit callant, that sending him abroad would have been the death of her.
To be sure, since these days—which, alas, and woe’s me! are not yesterday now, as my grey hair and wrinkled brow but too visibly remind me—such ups and downs have taken place in the commercial world, that the barber line has been clipped of its profits and shaved close, from a patriotic competition among its members, like all the rest. Among other things, hair-powder, which was used from the sweep on the lum-head to the king on the throne, is only now in fashion with the Lords of Session and valy-deshambles; and pig-tails have been cut off from the face of the earth,
root and branch. Nevertheless, as I have taken occasion to make observation, the foundations of the cutting and shaving line are as sure as that of the everlasting rocks; beards being likely to roughen, and heads to require polling, as long as wood grows and water runs.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN—“PUGGIE, PUGGIE”—A STORY WITHOUT A TAIL
The welfare of the human race and the improvement of society being my chief aim, in this record of my sayings and doings through the pilgrimage of life, I make bold at the instigation of Nanse, my worthy wife, to record in black and white a remarkably curious thing, to which I was an eye-witness in the course of nature. I have little reluctance to consent, not only because the affair was not a little striking in itself—as the reader will soon see—but because, like Æsop’s Fables, it bears a good moral at the end of it.
Many a time have I thought of the business alluded to, which happened to take place in our fore-shop one bonny summer afternoon, when I was selling a coallier wife, from the Marquis of Lothian’s upper hill, a yard of serge at our counter-side. At the time she came in, although busied in reading an account of one of Buonaparte’s battles in the Courant newspaper, I observed at her foot a bonny wee doggie, with a bushy black tail, of the dancing breed—that could sit on its hind-legs like a squirrel, cast biscuit from its nose, and play a thousand other most diverting tricks. Well, as I was saying, I saw the woman had a pride in the bit creature—it was just a curiosity like—and had belonged to a neighbour’s son that volunteered out of the Berwickshire militia (the Birses, as they were called), into a regiment that was draughted away into Egypt, Malta, or the East Indies, I believe—so,
it seems, the lad’s father and mother thought much more about it, for the sake of him that was off and away—being to their fond eyes a remembrancer, and to their parental hearts a sort of living keepsake.
After bargaining about the serge—and taking two or three other things, such as a leather-cap edged with rabbit-fur for her little nevoy—a dozen of plated buttons for her goodman’s new waistcoat, which was making up at Bonnyrig by Nicky Sharpshears, my old apprentice—and a spotted silk napkin for her own Sunday neck wear—I tied up the soft articles with grey paper and skinie, and was handing over the odd bawbees of change, when, just as she was lifting the leather-cap from the counter, she said with a terrible face, looking down to the ground as if she was short sighted, “Pity me! what’s that”?