About Barbers

All things change except barbers. These never change. What one experiences in a barber’s shop the first time he enters one is what he always experiences in barbers’ shops afterward till the end of his days.

I got shaved this morning as usual. A man approached the door from Jones Street as I approached it from Main – a thing that always happens. I hurried up, but it was of no use; he entered the door one little step ahead of me. I followed in right behind him and saw him take the only vacant chair, the one the best barber was responsible for. It always happens so. I sat down, hoping that I might be invited to the chair belonging to the better of the remaining two barbers. The better had already begun combing his man’s hair, while his comrade was not yet quite done oiling his customer’s locks. I watched the probabilities with strong interest. When I saw that No. 2 was gaining on No. 1 my interest grew into nervousness. When No. 1 stopped a moment, my nervousness rose to anxiety. When No. 1 caught up again, and both he and his comrade were pulling the towels away and brushing the powder from their customers’ cheeks, my very breath stood still with the suspense. But when at the culminating moment No. 1 stopped to pass a comb a couple of times through his customer’s eyebrows, I saw that he had lost the race, and I rose indignant and quitted the shop, to keep from falling into the hands of No. 2. I have none of that firmness that enables a man to look calmly into the eyes of a waiting barber and tell him he will wait for his colleague’s chair.

I stayed out fifteen minutes, and then went back, hoping for better luck. Of course all the chairs were occupied now, and four men sat waiting, silent, unsociable, and bored, as men who are waiting their turn in a barber’s shop always do. I sat down on an old sofa, and started reading the advertisements of all sorts for dyeing and coloring the hair. Then I read the names on the bottles; read the names and noted the numbers on the private shaving-cups; studied the stained and damaged cheap prints on the walls, of battles, early Presidents, and the everlasting young girl putting her grandfather’s spectacles on. Finally, I searched out one of last year’s illustrated papers and looked through its misrepresentations of old forgotten events.

At last my turn came. A voice said “Next!” and I surrendered to – No. 2, of course. It always happens so. I said meekly that I was in a hurry, and it affected him as strongly as if he had never heard it. He shoved up my head, and put a napkin under it. He plowed his fingers into my collar and fixed a towel there. He explored my hair with his claws and suggested that it needed trimming. I said I did not want it trimmed. He explored again and said it was pretty long for the present style, it needed trimming behind especially. I said I had had it cut only a week before. He then asked, who cut it? I came back with a “You did!” Then he fell to stirring up his lather and regarding himself in the glass, stopping now and then to get close and examine his chin critically or inspect a pimple. Then he lathered one side of my face thoroughly, and was about to lather the other, when a dog-fight attracted his attention. He ran to the window and saw it out. In the result, he lost two shillings on the result in bets with the other barbers, a thing which gave me great satisfaction. He finished lathering, and then began to rub in the suds with his hand.

He now began to sharpen his razor, and was suddenly lost in his memories of a cheap masquerade ball he had been to at the night before. He put down his razor and brushed his hair with elaborate care. In the mean time the lather was drying on my face, and apparently eating into my vitals.

Now he began to shave, digging his fingers into my face to stretch the skin and tumbling my head this way and that as convenience in shaving demanded. As long as he was on the tough sides of my face I did not suffer; but when he began to rake and tug at my chin, the tears came. He now took hold of my nose, to shave the corners of my upper lip, and it was at that moment that I discovered that a part of his duties in the shop was to clean the kerosene-lamps.

About this time I was trying to guess where he would be most likely to cut me this time. He got ahead of me, and sliced me on the end of the chin before I had got my mind made up. He immediately sharpened his razor. I do not like a close shave, and would not let him go over me a second time. He said he only wanted to smooth off one little roughness, and at the same moment he slipped his razor along the tenderest part of my chin. The dreaded pimples of a close shave rose up.

Now he soaked his towel in bay rum, and slapped it all over my face nastily. Then he dried it by slapping with the dry part of the towel. Next he poked bay rum into the cut with his towel, then choked the wound with powdered starch, then soaked it with bay rum again. He would have gone on doing it, no doubt, if I had not rebelled.

He powdered my whole face now and began to plow my hair thoughtfully with his hands. Then he suggested a shampoo, and said my hair needed it badly, very badly. I observed that I shampooed it myself very thoroughly in the bath yesterday. I “had him” again. He next recommended some of “Smith’s Hair Glorifier,” and offered to sell me a bottle. I declined. He praised the new perfume, “Jones’s Delight of the Toilet,” and proposed to sell me some of that. I declined again.

He returned to business, sprinkled me all over, legs and all, greased my hair in spite of my protest against it. He combed my scant eyebrows and defiled them with pomade. Right then I heard the whistles blow for noon, and knew I was five minutes too late for the train. Then he snatched away the towel, brushed it lightly about my face, passed his comb through my eyebrows once more, and gaily sang out “Next!”

This barber fell down and died of apoplexy two hours later. I am waiting over a day for my revenge – I am going to his funeral.

The Danger of Lying in Bed

The man in the ticket-office said:

“Would you like to have an accident insurance ticket, also?”

“No,” I said, after studying the matter over a little. “No, I believe not; I am going to be traveling by rail all day today. However, tomorrow I don’t travel. Give me one for tomorrow.”

The man looked puzzled. He said:

“But it is for accident insurance, and if you are going to travel by rail-”

“If I am going to travel by rail I won’t need it. Lying at home in bed is the thing _I – am afraid of.”

Last year I traveled twenty thousand miles, almost entirely by rail; the year before, I traveled over twenty-five thousand miles, half by sea and half by train; and the year before that I traveled ten thousand miles exclusively by rail. I may say I have traveled sixty thousand miles during the three years I have mentioned. AND NEVER AN ACCIDENT.

For quite a long time I said to myself every morning: “Now I have escaped thus far, and so the chances are just that much increased that I will catch it this time. I will buy an accident ticket.” And certainly everything went perfectly well. I bought accident tickets that were good for a month. I said to myself, “A man CAN’T buy thirty useless tickets.”

But I was mistaken. There was never a prize in the lot. I could read of railway accidents every day; but somehow they never came my way. I found I had spent a good deal of money in the accident business, and had nothing to show for it. I began to hunt around for somebody that had won in this lottery. I found plenty of people who had invested, but not an individual that had ever had an accident or made a cent. THE PERIL LAY NOT IN TRAVELING, BUT IN STAYING AT HOME.

I hunted up statistics, and was amazed to find that less than THREE HUNDRED people had really lost their lives by railroad disasters in the preceding twelve months. The Erie road was the most murderous in the list. It had killed forty-six – or twenty-six, I do not exactly remember which, but I know the number was double that of any other road. But the Erie was an immensely long road, and did more business than any other line in the country.

By further figuring, it appeared that between New York and Rochester the Erie ran eight passenger-trains each way every day – 16 altogether; and carried a daily average of 6,000 persons. That is about a million in six months – the population of New York City. Well, the Erie kills from 13 to 23 persons of ITS million in six months. At the same time 13,000 of New York’s million die in their beds! My hair stood on end. “This is terrible!” I said. “The danger isn’t in traveling by rail, but in trusting to those deadly beds. I will never sleep in a bed again.”

I had figured further that an average of 2,500 passengers a day for each road in the country would be almost correct. There are 846 railway lines in our country, and 846 times 2,500 are 2,115,000. So the railways of America move more than two millions of people every day; six hundred and fifty millions of people a year, without counting the Sundays. They do that, too – there is no question about it; though where they get the raw material is clear beyond the jurisdiction of my arithmetic, as I find that there are not that many people in the United States. They must use some of the same people over again, likely.

There are 500 deaths a week in New York and 60 deaths a week in San Francisco. That is 3,120 deaths a year in San Francisco, and eight times as many in New York – say about 25,000 or 26,000. The health of the two places is the same. So we will let it stand as a fair presumption that this will hold good all over the country, and that 25,000 out of every million of people we have must die every year. That is one-fortieth of our total population. One million of us, then, die every year. Out of this million ten or twelve thousand are stabbed, shot, drowned, hanged, poisoned, or meet a similarly violent death in some other popular way, such as perishing by kerosene-lamp, getting buried in coal-mines, falling off house-tops, taking patent medicines, or committing suicide in other forms. The Erie railroad kills 23 to 46; the other 845 railroads kill an average of one-third of a man each; and the rest of that million – 987,631 corpses – die naturally in their beds!

You will excuse me from taking any more chances on those beds. The railroads are good enough for me.

And my advice to all people is, Don’t stay at home any more than you can help; but when you have GOT to stay at home a while, buy a package of those insurance tickets and sit up nights. You cannot be too cautious.

The moral of this composition is, that people grumble more than is fair about railroad management in the United States. When we consider that every day and night of the year full fourteen thousand railway-trains of various kinds go over the land, the marvel is, NOT that they kill three hundred human beings a year, but that they do not kill nine hundred thousand!