The strange conversaziones a man may from time to time visit! I have been to one at the Hanover Square Rooms given by the confraternity of dentists. Slim gentlemen of Carker-like dental developement held forth on the transcendant merit of the art of pulling out people’s teeth, and fiercely denounced the quacks and impostors who ignorantly tampered with the jaws of her Majesty’s subjects; the room itself was hung round with the most hideous coloured cartoons, representative of diverse phases of dental surgery, and I came away haunted by visions of pink beeswax, thin gold plates, morocco easy chairs, springs, _dents osanores_, artificial gums, and those dreadfully clean hands, the wrists garnished by wristbands as clean, which seem to be the exclusive property of dentists. I congratulated myself, too, on my departure, on the fact that no visitor to the conversazione had, for the pure love of art, pulled out one of my few remaining teeth, just as, after dining with a schoolmaster, I felicitate myself for having escaped a caning. There is something in the whiteness of a dentist’s hand, and in the twinkling of a schoolmaster’s gray eye, that would make me tremble were I Lord Chancellor of Great Britain. But the oddest conversazione I ever attended was not in this country, but in a foreign land. It was in Paris—and I am speaking seriously—a conversazione of _coiffeurs_, of barbers, hair-dressers, and wig-makers. I declare that I have seldom passed a more agreeable evening in my life. Everything was conducted on the most intensely genteel footing, and everybody was ceremoniously polite; although I must be candid in admitting that a decided odour of pomatum and freshly-frizzled curls pervaded the _salon_, which was, indeed, the upstairs room of a _restaurant_ at Montmartre. There were ladies present, too; and after some pleasant little discourse, all tending to the glorification of hair-dressing, an eminent professor of the philocomal art there present proceeded to a series of practical and illustrative experiments on the heads of some of the young ladies, in order to show the different styles of dressing and arranging the head which had prevailed from the time of François, _premier jusqu’ à nos jours_, to our own days. The ladies submitted with charming equanimity to the operation, and the experimentalist was enabled to submit to public inspection and admiration a full-blown Ninon d’Enclos, a Mademoiselle de Montpensier, a Duchesse de Longueville, a Madame de Maintenon, together with several Du Barris, De la Vallières, Pompadours, Madame Talliens, Mademoiselle Mars, Charlotte Cordays, and Théroigne de Méricourts. At the conclusion of the experiments, there was a grand procession of the ladies variously _coiffées_ round the room, followed by the triumphant hair-dressers, waving their tongs and combs, and redolent of puff-powder; then we had _orgeat_ and _anisette_; and then I went and supped in the _restaurant_