Poll
Sweedlepipe, the sinner, shaved all comers at a penny each, and cut the
hair of any customer for twopence; and being a lone unmarried man, and
having some connection in the bird line, Poll got on tolerably well.
He was a little elderly man, with a clammy cold right hand, from which
even rabbits and birds could not remove the smell of shaving-soap. Poll
had something of the bird in his nature; not of the hawk or eagle, but
of the sparrow, that builds in chimney-stacks and inclines to human
company. He was not quarrelsome, though, like the sparrow; but peaceful,
like the dove. In his walk he strutted; and, in this respect, he bore
a faint resemblance to the pigeon, as well as in a certain prosiness of
speech, which might, in its monotony, be likened to the cooing of that
bird. He was very inquisitive; and when he stood at his shop-door in the
evening-tide, watching the neighbours, with his head on one side, and
his eye cocked knowingly, there was a dash of the raven in him. Yet
there was no more wickedness in Poll than in a robin. Happily, too, when
any of his ornithological properties were on the verge of going too
far, they were quenched, dissolved, melted down, and neutralised in
the barber; just as his bald head--otherwise, as the head of a shaved
magpie--lost itself in a wig of curly black ringlets, parted on one
side, and cut away almost to the crown, to indicate immense capacity of
intellect.
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