Page:The Decameron of the West (1839).djvu/171

 eye only was visible, beheld the door broken open, and the ghost enter in the person of a lean, haggard-looking old man, covered with a long scarlet mantle, and on his head he wore a pointed cap. Silently, and with a heavy tread, he thrice paraded the chamber, then snuffed the candles, which burned more clearly. The next operation of this mysterious nightly visitor was to doff his mantle. From his girdle were suspended a razor and other implements of a barber’s profession. He poured water into a silver basin, put a piece of soap into the same, with a brush frothed up the soap to a white foam, next placed a low stool at the bedside; and the conclusion of these strange manœuvres was a wave of the hand, and a look of earnest entreaty that Francis might seat himself on the stool, whither the ghost pointed with his finger. Astonishing to conceive! the young man, who lay paralyzed with fear, started from his couch as if by an electric shock, and was instantly seated on the stool. Poor Francis submitted his cranium to the touch of the Spectre Barber as readily as we would, in our enlightened times, suffer the hands of Messrs Gall and Spurzheim to discover our tangible developments of brain. Having at first removed from the chin all superfluous hair, he then spared not his whiskers; and, last of all, the