In the winter he would be sleeping in decent nooks, eating his food in quiet inns, drying his coat at the forge; and so he goes now into the corners of the world--the little husky fat man, with large spectacles and fox-coloured beard and tough boots that had slits and gouts in them--gone seeking the feathers out of Priam’s peacock. And let him go; we take no more concern of him or his shining skull or his tra-la-la in the highways.
The barber, who had a romantic drift of mind, went into his saloon, and taking up the two cracked china lather mugs he flung them from the open window into his back garden, putting the fear of some evil into the mind of his drowsy cat, and a great anticipation in the brains of his two dusty hens, who were lurking there for anything that could be devoured. Mr. Piffingcap placed the pot made of lead upon his convenient shelf, laid therein his brush, lit the small gas stove under the copper urn, and when Polly, the child from the dairy, arrived with her small can for the barber’s large jug she found him engaged in shaving the chin of Timmy James the butcher, what time Mr. James was engaged in a somewhat stilted conversation with Gregory Barnes about the carnal women of Bagwood.
Polly was a little lean girl, eight or nine years old, with a face that was soft and rosy and fresh as the bud of gum on the black branches of the orchard. She wore a pretty dimity frock and had gay flowers in her hat. This was her last house of call, and, sitting down to watch Mr. Piffingcap, the town’s one barber, shaving friends and enemies alike, she would be the butt of their agreeable chaff because of her pleasant country jargon--as rich as nutmeg in a homely cake--or her yellow scattered hair, or her sweet eyes that were soft as remembered twilight.
“Your razor is roaring, Mr. Piffingcap!”--peeping round the chair at him. “Oh, it’s that Mr. James!” she would say in pretended surprise. Mr. James had a gruff beard, and the act of removing it occasioned a noise resembling that of her mother scraping the new potatoes.
“What have you got this pot for?” she chattered; “I don’t like it, it’s ugly.”
“Don’t say that now,” said Mr. Piffingcap, pausing with his hand on the butcher’s throttle, “it was Mr. Grafton’s parting gift to me; I shall never see him again, nor will you neither; he’s gone round the world for ever more this time!”