places. A fanciful individual suffering thus
might suppose himself to be the old original
Prometheus, and his tormentor, the vulture,
about to dine upon him. Having been now
punched, and poked, and pulled, and pressed
sufficiently, the victim is lifted up by the
hand as helpless as an heir apparent, and
then being reseated he shares passively in a
wild orgy which we will call lathering. The
demon of the bath takes a long stringy thing
in his hand—it looks like a mop without a
handle—and he scrubs the miserable body
confided to him with stern animation. Something
comes off it in flakes. The advocates of
the bath maintain these flakes to be composed
of the various impurities of the skin; but I
am much disposed to question the accuracy
of this opinion, and having suffered the most
acute pain from the subsequent contact of my
clothes, I have reason to believe that I was
very nearly flayed during this process,
though from having been previously nearly
boiled, and the atmosphere being generally
warm and greasy, the operation did not cause
me the acute agony at the time which it
would cause under ordinary circumstances.
Having been lathered more than sufficiently,
with eyes, nose, ears, mouth, and every
crick and cranny in his body utterly stopped
up and glutinous with soap, the wretched
searcher after cleanliness under difficulties,
is at last perfectly soused with a deluge of
scalding water, and being swaddled up anew
and led into the outer apartment, the air of
which strikes upon him as that of an
ice-house, he sinks exhausted beside the
consoling pipe and coffee which have been
prepared for him. Never is sleep more
grateful than that which follows, though I
am bound to confess, for my own part, that I
could not help dreaming fitfully of the vulture
who had been clawing me, and at last I
woke, in imminent apprehension of him, and
found the barber.

The Eastern barber is a distinguished
personage. He has been so under all rabid
despotisms. It was found inconvenient not
to treat with considerable deference an
individual who also enjoyed a sort of absolute
despotism,—who, in point of fact, was a rival
potentate in his way, and might doom you to
execution if ever the idea should occur to
him as being agreeable or advantageous. It
is not surprising that barbers invested with
so much dignity should have a lively
consciousness of their exalted station in society.
The most elderly and experienced person,
when admitted to the honourable craft of
viscounts or barons, has the same. It is
indeed a natural sentiment, and common to
all magnates alike. I notice, therefore, without
surprise, that the shaver now introduced
to me has a dignified charm of manner and
grace of attitude while taking the small hair
out of my nose, and the gray hairs out of my
eyebrows, which almost causes me to forget
the excruciating anguish arising from so
unlooked-for a proceeding. He polishes me up
indeed to such a powerful and surprising
extent, that I do not know my own face in
the pretty little tortoiseshell and mosaic-framed
looking-glass which he hands me, that
I may admire in it the perfection of his art.
He has shaved me with such a light hand that
I set that individual down as a goose who
shaveth himself in Turkey. My chin is as
smooth as a very dark species of ivory; my
eyebrows have been miraculously arched. I
feel for the favourite tuft on my right ear in
vain. My visage and all thereto pertaining
is as bare as the palm of a lady's hand. I
have grown quite juvenile during this strange
operation. I came hither a rusty elderly
gentleman as needs to be. I shall depart an
adventurous youth on my travels, and
hotel-keepers will rejoice to take me in. I vow and
declare that my moustaches are twisted into
points sharp and dark and insinuating
enough, to go straight through the heart of
sweet seventeen. The barber contemplates
the improvement in my personal appearance
with due gravity and enjoyment. I am the
last triumph of his art, and he is proud of me.
If it were not for a slight twinge of a most
intrusive and unaccountable rheumatism, I
should be proud of myself.

The barber veils his eyes with his hands,
and prostrates himself before the Beys Adé.
I notice with a kindred pang that Hamet is
distressed at the depth of his reverence, and
I prophesy that my store of Turkish small
change in the Albanian pouch will sensibly
shrink ere that barber departeth.

Let us dress and depart also. Hamed
brings my linen, which has been washed at
the bath during my ablutions, and holds a
curtain before me as a screen from the vulgar,
while I put it on. He is always very particular
in this respect, and he will not allow
me to be seen by profane eyes in my
shirt-sleeves on any account. I must be arrayed in
the full glory of a gay-coloured plaid shooting
coat (bought of a Maltese Jew), and I must
have on my eyeglass (which I hear the
Rhodians have mistaken for a British
military order of a high class) before he will let
me go forth. His fierce rugged face and
well-knit figure, the splendour of his Albanian
dress and his glittering arms, contrast, as
they often do, oddly enough, with the
employment he has imposed on himself.

And now comes the quarter of an hour
so pathetically mentioned by old Rabelais.
I must pay for the loss of my skin and
for my renovated youth. Unhappily for
my slender purse, which has long been in
a galloping consumption, people in Turkey
do not pay what things are worth, but what
they themselves are supposed to be worth.
Now they appear to find it convenient
wherever I owe anything to call me Beys
Adé, which signifies great lord, or something
altogether out of the common way; and
therefore I am ruthlessly muleted of a sum