the barber
shop. He may have, and it may have been that that turned his mind to
investment. But it's hard to see how he could. A shave cost five cents,
and a hair-cut fifteen (or the two, if you liked, for a quarter), and
at that it is hard to see how he could make money, even when he had both
chairs going and shaved first in one and then in the other.

You see, in Mariposa, shaving isn't the hurried, perfunctory thing that
it is in the city. A shave is looked upon as a form of physical pleasure
and lasts anywhere from twenty-five minutes to three-quarters of an
hour.

In the morning hours, perhaps, there was a semblance of haste about it,
but in the long quiet of the afternoon, as Jeff leaned forward towards
the customer, and talked to him in a soft confidential monotone, like a
portrait painter, the razor would go slower and slower, and pause and
stop, move and pause again, till the shave died away into the mere
drowse of conversation.

At such hours, the Mariposa barber shop would become a very Palace of
Slumber, and as you waited your turn in one of the wooden arm-chairs
beside the wall, what with the quiet of the hour, and the low drone of
Jeff's conversation, the buzzing of the flies against the window pane
and the measured tick of the clock above the mirror, your head sank
dreaming on your breast, and the Mariposa Newspacket rustled unheeded on
the floor. It makes one drowsy just to think of it!

The conversation, of course, was the real charm of the place. You see,
Jefferson's forte, or specialty, was information. He could tell you more
things within the compass of a half-hour's shave than you get in days
of laborious research in an encyclopaedia. Where he got it all, I
don't know, but I am inclined to think it came more or less out of the
newspapers.

In the city, people never read the newspapers, not really, only little
bits and scraps of them. But in Mariposa it's different. There they read
the whole thing from cover to cover, and they build up on it, in
the course of years, a range of acquirement that would put a college
president to the blush. Anybody who has ever heard Henry Mullins and
Peter Glover talk about the future of China will know just what I mean.

And, of course, the peculiarity of Jeff's conversation was that he could
suit it to his man every time. He had a kind of divination about it.
There was a certain kind of man that Jeff would size up sideways as
he stropped the razor, and in whos