He left home to secure that miraculous compound. He secured it. Having time on hand, he resolved to devote it to the adornment of his person. He dropped into a barber’s temple in Wicklow Street. Now, in the British Isles, you cannot visit a barber for a five-cent shave without being subjected by him to eloquent seductions to purchase three or four dollars’ worth of hair-dyes, washes, cosmetics, and face powders. Frederick’s barber was like the rest of his insular tribe. He had barely got his devastating scissors ready for action on our hero’s cranium before he ventured to suggest that Fred’s hair was not--well, not quite a fashionable color. As the locks in question were of the decidedly martial color usually associated with the uniform of the English line or the--hem--nether garments of the French infantry, Frederick assented.
“You should try our hair-dye, Balsam of Peru,” said the tonsorial artist. “It will make your hair as black as the hob of--I mean as the raven’s wing.”
Fred was about, like an editor, to decline with thanks, when he thought of Norah, pretty little Norah, and in a fatal moment he invested in the dye.
“Your mustache ain’t quite a miracle,” suggested the knight of the scissors.
It wasn’t quite a miracle. It was a somewhat dilapidated, disjointed sort of a mustache--what there was of it. It grew in stray patches and odd hairs, with five minutes’ desert intervals for reflection between the stray oases of tufts and vegetation. Fred mournfully indorsed the coiffeur’s opinion.
“Ah, try our Formula. It would grow whiskers on a billiard ball or a beard on a foundation stone with a single application. Only a shilling.”
A bottle of Formula found its way into Frederick’s pocket.
“Those hairs on your nose don’t remarkably add to the striking beauty of your classic features,” once more insinuated the demon of the lather-pot.
They didn’t. It was strange, but Norah had made a precisely similar remark. In fact, that capillary addition to his proboscis was one of the principal barriers between Frederick and his fondest hopes. He agreed with his evil genius.
“You should use our Depilatory. Bound to make a clothes brush as bare as a smoothing iron. Costs a mere trifle. Only two shillings.”