d the fashion soon spread among people of all ranks.

So highly prized was the beard in former times that Baldwin, Prince of
Edessa, as Nicephorus relates in his Chronicle, pawned his beard for a
large sum of money, which was redeemed by his father Gabriel, Prince of
Melitene, to prevent the ignominy which his son must have suffered by
its loss. And when Juan de Castro, the Portuguese admiral, borrowed a
thousand pistoles from the citizens of Goa he pledged one of his
whiskers, saying, "All the gold in the world cannot equal this natural
ornament of my valour." And it is said the people of Goa were so much
affected by the noble message that they remitted the money and returned
the whisker--though of what earthly use it could prove to the gallant
admiral, unless, perhaps, to stuff a tennis ball, it is not easy to say.

To deprive a man of his beard was a token of ignominious subjection, and
is still a common mode of punishment in some Asiatic countries. And such
was the treatment that the conjuror Pinch received at the hands of
Antipholus of Ephesus and his man, in the _Comedy of Errors_, according
to the servant's account of the outrage, who states that not only had
they "beaten the maids a-row," but they

bound the doctor,
Whose beard they have singed off with brands of fire;
And ever as it blazed they threw on him
Great pails of puddled mire to quench the hair (v, 1).

In Persia and India when a wife is found to have been unfaithful, her
hair--the distinguishing ornament of woman, as the beard is considered
to be that of man--is shaved off, among other indignities.

Don Sebastian Cobbarruvius gravely relates the following marvellous
legend to show that nothing so much disgraced a Spaniard as pulling his
beard: "A noble of that nation dying (his name Cid Lai Dios), a Jew, who
hated him much in his lifetime, stole privately into the room where his
body was laid out, and, thinking to do what he never durst while living,
stooped down and plucked his beard; at which the body started up, and
drawing out half way his sword, which lay beside him, put the Jew in
such a fright that he ran out of the room as if a thousand devils had
been behind him. This done, the body lay down as before to rest; and,"
adds the veracious chronicler, "the Jew after that turned
Christian."--In the third of Don Quevedo's Visions of the Last Judgment,
we read that a Spaniard, after receiving sentence, was taken into