The barber’s hand is unlike that of any other soft hand: it is not flabby, like that of a sensualist; nor arid, and thin, like a student’s; nor dead white, like that of a delicate female; but it is _naturally_ warm, of a glowing, transparent colour, and of a cushiony, elastic softness. Beneath its conciliatory touch, as it prepares the skin for the sweeping course of the razor, and its gentle pressure, as it inclines the head to either side, to aid the operation of the scissors, a man may sit for hours, and feel no weariness. Happy must he be who lived in the days of long, or full-dressed hair, and resigned himself for a full hour to the passive luxury of hair-dressing! A morning’s toilette--(for a gentleman, I mean; being a bachelor, I am uninitiated in the arcana of a lady’s dressing-room)--a morning’s toilette in those days was indeed an important part of the “business of life:” there were the curling-irons, the comb, the pomatum, the powder-puff, the powder-knife, the mask, and a dozen other requisites to complete the elaborate process that perfected that mysterious “frappant, or tintinabulant appendage” to the back part of the head. Oh! it must have been a luxury--a delight surpassing the famed baths and cosmetics of the east. I have said that the barber is a gentle man; if not in so many words, I have at least pointed out that distinguishing trait in him. He is also a humane man: his occupation of torturing hairs leaves him neither leisure nor disposition to torture ought else. He looks as respectable as he is; and he is void of any appearance of deceit or cunning. There is less of personality or egotism about him than mankind in general: though he possesses an idiosyncrasy, it is that of his class, not of himself. As he sits, patiently renovating some dilapidated peruke, or perseveringly presides over the developement of grace in some intractable bush of hair, or stands at his own threshold, in the cleanly pride of white apron and hose, lustrous shoes, and exemplary jacket, with that studied yet seeming disarrangement of hair, as though subduing, as far as consistent with propriety, the visible appearance of technical skill--as he thus, untired, goes the never-varying round of his pleasant occupation, and active leisure, time seems to pass unheeded, and the wheel of chance, scattering fragments of circumstance from the rock of destiny, continues its relentless and unremittent revolution, unnoticed by him. He hears not the roar of the fearful engine, the groans and sighs of despair, or the wild laugh of exultation, produced by its mighty working. All is remote, strange, and intricate, and belongs not to him to know. He dwells in an area of peace--a magic circle whose area might be described by his obsolete sign-pole!