"Hi there, master barber!" cried the new-comer. "Cease your wrangling, and come and cut me my hair! Dost think I am going to wait for you all night?"
"Presently, your worship—presently," answered Peter, snatching up his scissors and comb. Then, turning to his son, he added: "Thy mother is laid abed with her old illness, Tim; get thee upstairs to her for awhile."
Timothy obediently disappeared through the door at the back of the shop, stumbling up the stairs with noisy feet and equally noisy sword; while his father, snipping his scissors merrily in his right hand and thus making a show of being exceedingly busy, offered his customer a chair where the light from the window might fall upon him.
He was a stranger to Peter Trollope, and therefore, it must be assumed, a stranger to Plymouth also. His long, untidy hair and beard, his bronzed skin, and, indeed, his whole appearance, betokened that he had newly come off the sea. His doublet, which had once been velvet, was worn threadbare; the colour, whatever it may originally have been, had suffered by the salt water, and was now an indistinct gray, stained here and there with dark-brown patches, which Peter surmised to be the stains of hardened blood. It was plain to see that the man was in some sort a warrior as well as a traveller.
While the barber was spreading a white napkin about him to protect his clothing from the clippings of hair which must presently fall from the scissors, he looked into the stranger's face, and perceived that the right cheek was marred by an old wound—a long straight wound like the cut of a knife, beginning below the eye and ending somewhere in the midst of his thick black beard.
"Well?" quoth the stranger, seeing that the barber hesitated to make a start. "Cut me my hair, I say."
"I am ready to execute your worship's will," announced Peter with a low bow, as he snipped his scissors. "Prithee, sir, will you have your worship's hair cut after the Italian manner, short and round, and then flounced with the curling-irons, or like a Spaniard's, long at the ears and curled like to the two ends of a new moon; or will you be Frenchified with a love-lock down to your shoulder, whereon you may hang your lady's favour? The English cut is base in these days of fashion, and gentlemen scorn it. Speak the word, sir; and howsoever you would have it, it shall be done."
"Nay, a plague on your love-locks and curling-irons," the stranger cried impatiently. "Do it as you please, but howsoever you do it, do it quickly. I know naught of your strange fashions and monstrous manners of haircutting. I have been absent from England so many years, that now when I come back I am as one who hath risen from out his grave to find all things changed."
"In truth, sir," observed the barber, "your worship will indeed find many changes, alike in government and in manners, if so be your absence hath been so long as you do say. Her Majesty's ministers and counsellors, indeed, have changed as often as the seasons. But the Queen herself, God bless her, is yet with us; so England is merry England still, and long may it so remain!"