The girl agreed that it was, and, stepping to the door, looked anxiously up the street and down the street, but there was no barber in sight.
"Do you want to see him on any particular business?" inquired Howard.
"Bless my heart! no, not I," said Grimaldi: "I only want to be shaved."
"Shaved, sir!" cried the girl. "Oh, dear me! what a pity it is you did not say so before! for I do most of the shaving for father when he's at home, and all when he's out."
"To be sure she does," said Howard; "I have been shaved by her fifty times."
"You have!" said Grimaldi. "Oh, I'm sure I have no objection. I am quite ready, my dear."
Grimaldi sat himself down in a chair, and the girl commenced the task in a very business-like manner, Grimaldi feeling an irresistible tendency to laugh at the oddity of the operation, but smothering it by dint of great efforts while the girl was shaving his chin. At length, when she got to his upper lip, and took his nose between her fingers with a piece of brown paper, he could stand it no longer, but burst into a tremendous roar of laughter, and made a face at Howard, which the girl no sooner saw than she dropped the razor and laughed immoderately also; whereat Howard began to laugh too, which only set Grimaldi laughing more; when just at this moment in came the barber, who, seeing three people in convulsions of mirth, one of them with a soapy face and a gigantic mouth making the most extravagant faces over a white towel, threw himself into a chair without ceremony, and dashing his hat on the ground, laughed louder than any of them, declaring in broken words as he could find breath to utter them, that "that gentleman as was being shaved, was out of sight the funniest gentleman he had ever seen," and entreating him to "stop them faces, or he knew he should die." When they were all perfectly exhausted, the barber finished what his daughter had begun; and rewarding the girl with a shilling, Grimaldi and the manager took their leaves.
Having settled at the theatre, received his money, and made several purchases in the town, (for he always spent a per-centage in every place where he had been successful,) Grimaldi returned to Liverpool on the 24th of August.
