I did not fall into a very gaudy barber shop. The appointments were like some of the president's appointments, I thought--viz., in poor taste, but this is not a political letter. I do not wish to antagonize anybody, especially the president of the United States. He has always treated me well. 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.