Page:Inside Canton.djvu/66

Rh, these instruments are excellent; you scarcely feel them run over your skin. When the itinerant barbers pass through a street, they cause the long pincers of which I have previously spoken, and the branches of which do the duty of a tuning-fork, to vibrate; this is their manner of announcing their presence. The penetrating sound passes through every fissure, and the customer, having thus received notice, sends for the artist if his services are needed. But the lower classes are not so particular; they entrust their heads simply to the street barbers. The only stock in trade which the latter possess is a stool, a tub, a case containing two or three razors, a strop, a pair of pincers, and a little instrument made of bamboo, the use of which I will state presently.

It is no rare occurrence to see, in the bye-streets of Canton, thirty or forty Chinamen, one after the other, as motionless as the old wig blocks, and on whom the barbers of the Celestial Empire are performing all the operations of their trade. The following is the mode of proceeding: They begin by washing the head and shaving that portion of the body: having done this, they untie the queue, which they carefully comb and plait; armed with long pincers, they then clear the ears and the nose from the parasitical hairs that encroach upon them. Moreover, they indulge in a most delicate practice: with the aid of the little bamboo rod of which I