ne cannot see and reach; and herein possibly is
the reason for a fashion which has often perplexed students of the
Norman Conquest. The Norman soldiery wore no hair on the backs of their
heads; and each brave fellow could sit down in front of his polished
shield and cut his own hair without much trouble. But the scheme had a
weakness; the back of the head had to be shaved; and the fashion
doubtless went out because, after all, nothing was gained by it. One
simply turned over on one's face in the barber's chair instead of
sitting up straight.

Fortunately we begin having a haircut when we are too young to think,
and when also the process is sugar-coated by the knowledge that we are
losing our curls. Then habit accustoms us to it. Yet it is significant
that men of refinement seek the barber in secluded places, basements of
hotels for choice, where they can be seen only by barbers and by other
refined men having or about to have haircuts; and that men of less
refinement submit to the operation where every passer-by can stare in
and see them, bibs round their necks and their shorn locks lying in
pathetic little heaps on the floor. There is a barber's shop of this
kind in Boston where one of the barbers, having no head to play with,
plays on a cornet, doubtless to the further distress of his immortal
soul peeping in through the window. But this is unusual even in the city
that is known far and wide as the home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

I remember a barber--he was the only one available in a small town--who
cut my left ear. The deed distressed him, and he told me a story. It was
a pretty little cut, he said,--filling it with alum,--and reminded him
of another gentleman whose left ear he had nipped in identically the
same place. He had done his best with alum and apology, as he was now
doing. Two months later the gentleman came in again. 'And by golly!'
said the barber, with a kind of wonder at his own cleverness, 'if I
didn't nip him again in just the same place!'

A man can shave himself. The Armless Wonder does it in the Dime Museum.
Byron did it, and composed poetry during the operation; although, as I
have recently seen scientifically explained, the facility of composition
was not due to the act of shaving but to the normal activity of the
human mind at that time in the morning. Here, therefore, a man can
refuse the offices of the barber. If he wishes to make one of a
half-dozen apparently inanimate figures, th