Certainly the man had a great deal to answer for. His whole life seemed to have been one round of juggling, and imposition, and deceit. Not that I would visit all the blame upon him, for, from what I could learn, his good-for-nothing father really seemed to have been no better than he should have been. Indeed, Mr. Dick Farden told me one day, while he was rubbing down our dining-room table, that “his old governor” (as he called his paternal parent) had originally been in the hair-dressing, shaving, and perfuming line, and had at one time the heads of at least a hundred families in his care, and the chins of half an entire parish under his hands. Consequently, Mr. Farden, sen. did a very extensive business in “Macassars,” “Circassian creams,” “Balm of Columbias,” “Botanic Waters,” and other only safe and speedy means by which baldness is effectually removed, and the hair renovated, beautified, and preserved; for whilst he was cutting and curling his customers, he used invariably to persuade them that their locks were thinning and falling off dreadfully, and that the hair, being nothing more nor less than a vegetable, and the head merely the field in which it sprouted, of course, whenever the crops were cut, it stood to reason that the soil required manuring with a good top-dressing of bear’s grease, while the roots of the plants naturally needed being occasionally irrigated with “botanic water;” adding, that the days were shortly coming when the barber would be ranked with the farmer, and looked upon as the tiller of the head, or hairgriculturist.