Gulliver attends the king’s levee once or twice a week. He often watches him being shaved, which is terrifying at first. The razor is almost twice the length of an ordinary scythe.
By the custom of the country, the king is shaved only twice a week. Gulliver persuades the barber to give him some of the lather, and picks out of it forty or fifty of the strongest stumps of hair.
He cuts a piece of fine wood like the back of a comb and bores holes in it at even distances with the smallest needle he can get from Glumdalclitch. He fixes the stumps in, scraping and sloping them toward the points with his knife, and makes a very tolerable comb. His own has lost so many teeth it is almost useless.