The New Hampshire Gazette

Shaving—This term, which is in more common use, perhaps, than almost any other in its simplicity of definition, has application to the barber's portion of the community, and the taking off of the beard, which, in many instances, is an act displaying a greater degree of barbarism than can be met with among Sioux or Cherokees. A bungling barber is a bore to all good society, and deserves a more faithful chastisement than quacks of any other profession. He filches from a man's purse, at the same time he extorts groans from his chest.—

He is the cause of a vast amount of pain and uneasiness—for which there is but one consolation, viz: a belief in future rewards and punishments. To go into a barber's shop with a smooth, whole countenance, and seat one's self with the hope and expectation of being comfortably unburdened of a beard, which has been accumulating until, like an unseaworthy vessel, it is condemned as no longer wearable, and not only to suffer tortures till every muscle is drawn awry, but to rise from the seat with a scarified and gory phiz, is a misfortune which a whole week's time cannot heal. It puts a man out of all countenance, renders him cross and crabbed—and his pride is humbled to think that he should submit to be thus abominably shaved. and by a barber.

But there is another specimen of shaving, which is effected in a more genteel and polished style—we mean, note shaving "Rhino," is the razor, and soft soap the lather. If deep incisions are made, which almost always occur, they are done with such nicety, that the wounded man verily believes himself as sound as any of his unshorn fellows. It is difficult to determine how this comfortable feeling is generated. for the wound, although he believes it not, is absolutely incurable, and his case desperate and hopeless beyond conception. The man indeed, becomes a maniac, bereft of all sense and is not content in suffering himself to be decently shaved for once, but is constantly craving a repetition, which the shavers without mercy grant, until he awakes as from a dream, and finds himself so thoroughly scraped, that not a particle of his skin remains. These barbers have a mysterious method of performing their transactions. None of them use the pole with a twining snake, for a sign and omen, but they are ever found perched upon high banks, or lounging around incorporated places—and some of them have invented shaving mills, by which whole communities have been sucked in, & their faces ground into most rueful and disconsolate expressions. This is shaving, in its most extended significance.—Prov. Cadet.