sky having been the roof of my toilet room, I was ready to invest a little more money, so, seeking out another store, I fitted a becoming hat to my seeded locks and was helped into a topcoat good enough to keep it company. After this I began to have that feeling which the dude possesses, and, to better fit the rôle, I sought a barber-shop, where I asked to have my bristled face shaved, but declined the sympathetic barber’s invitation to have my hair “cut or trimmed.” Of all the men with “an eye to business,” I think the barber can discount the whole lot, in making one really believe that he hasn’t the slightest designs on money. He seems to think that his customer has arrived at the brink of committing the unpardonable sin if he doesn’t have his hair cut, and before the argument is finished, I’ll wager a hen’s egg against a prize hennery that the deluded one will accept his barber as a veritable oracle; and the most curious phase of all this is that the knight of the scissors has, through familiarity with the rôle, come to believe it himself. But I venture to say that he is nearly always round when the money is handed out. But, back to my barber. It almost brought tears to my eyes to resist the mute appeal in his,--those eyes that were even more eloquently solicitous of my welfare than his lips. But for personal reasons I had to pain him, and presently I was stretched out in a chair and had my own way about it. Goodness knows this barber may not be justly accused by me of sparing his labor, for as I sat with my eyes closed most of the time, his hands appeared to move rapidly enough, but I vow they were not so active as was his voluble tongue. When he was not bombarding me, he was exchanging words with a pair of loungers in the shop, who, like some women, must gossip about something to pass the time away. I expected to hear the Cadiz bank affair discussed, though I thought it must have reached a stage of staleness by that time. Yet, when I heard the barber broach the subject, a slight tremor, despite an effort to control myself, went over me. “Bright youngster that Dever,” he remarked to the loungers. I listened intently. “Yes? Who?” queried one of them. “Jim Dever’s boy, down on the Wheeling road. You know, I s’pose, he wuz the one that put the deputies on to the robbers. No? Well, he was up that night, an’ it bein’ moonlight he sees a man at the hencoop, an’ it turned out sure ’nough to be one of ’em. He got in his pants in a jiffy, followed th’ feller, and pretty soon he sees two deputies an’ tells ’em that he thinks th’ robbers are round. Th’ deputies get up to snuff, and next day a gang of the boys swoops down on ’em.” “Got ’em all, I s’pose,” interposed one of the loungers.