mer;
for the tailor's worst tool is a tape-measure, and his worst discovery
may be that the customer is growing fat. One waits, indeed, without
serious apprehension, at the barber's; but here the company is mixed and
the knowledge inescapable that it will look on with idle interest while
he cuts your hair or covers your honest face with lather. Only the
harmless necessary assistant will see you measured, and he, by long
practise, has acquired an air of remoteness and indifference that makes
him next thing to invisible. So complete indeed is this tactful
abstraction that one might imagine him a man newly fallen in love.

I have seen it stated, though I cannot remember just where, that the Old
Testament makes no mention of the tailor; the Book, however, shows
plainly that Solomon was not only a sage but also a best-dresser, and it
stands to reason that his wives did not make his clothes. One wife might
have done it, but not three hundred. A tailor came at intervals to the
palace, and then went back to where, somewhere in the business section
of the ancient city, there was doubtless a tablet with a cuneiform
inscription:--

I am he that makes the
Glory of Solomon: yea,
and Maker of the Upper
and the Nether Glory.

The Smart Set of Solomon's day patronized him, yet he remained, quite
naturally, beneath the notice of the Old Testament writers--unfashionable
men, one may readily believe, living at a convenient period when a
garment very much like our own bath-robe answered their own purposes,
and could probably be bought ready-to-wear.

But one can no more think of a full-blown civilization without tailors
than one can imagine a complex state of society in which, for example,
the contemporary _Saturday Evening Post_ would publish its Exclusive
Saturday Evening Styles, and gentlemen would habitually buy their
patterns by bust-measure and cut out their new suits at home on the
dining-room table. The idea may seem practical, but the bust with men is
evidently not a reliable guide to all the other anatomical proportions.
Nor, again, however little the Old Testament concerns itself with
tailors, did it fail to mention the first of them. The line goes back to
Adam, cross-legged under the Tree--the first tailor and the first
customer together--companioned, pleasantly enough, by the first 'little
dressmaker.' They made their clothes together, and made them alike--an
impressive, beautiful symbol of the perfect harmony be