et of the ready-to-wear clothier lies in his
ability to meet on the spot conditions which no single pattern could
hope to anticipate. We must go back toward nature, and stop short at
Adam, to find a costume that any gentleman can successfully make for
himself.

Personally I prefer the immemorial visit to the tailor; I like this
restful atmosphere, in which unborn suits of clothes contentedly await
creation in rolls of cloth, and the styles of the season are exhibited
by pictures of gentlemen whose completely vacuous countenances
comfortably repudiate the desirability of being 'leaders of men.' On the
table the _Geographical Magazine_ invites to unexciting wonder at the
way other people dress. From the next room one hears the voice of the
tailor, leisurely reporting to his assistant as he tape-measures a
customer. In the lineage of a vocation it is odd to think that his
great-great-great grandfather might have sat cross-legged to inspire the
poem

A carrion crow sat on an oak
Watching a tailor shape a coat.

'Wife, bring me my old bent bow
That I may shoot yon carrion crow.'

The tailor shot, and he missed the mark,
And shot the miller's sow through the heart.

'Wife, O, wife, bring brandy in a spoon,
For the old miller's sow is in a swoon.'

The quick and unexpected tragedy (for the sow) etches the old-time
tailor at his work: one gets, as it were, a crow's-eye view of him.
Such, I imagine, was his universal aspect, cross-legged on a bench in
his little stall or beside his open window, more skilled with shears and
needle than with lethal weapon, despite the gallant brigade of tailors
who went to battle under the banner of Queen Elizabeth. Yet I cannot
imagine my own tailor sitting cross-legged beside an open window; nor,
for that matter, sitting cross-legged anywhere, except perhaps on the
sands of the sea in his proper bathing-suit. His genealogy begins with
those 'taylours' who, in the nineteenth year of Henry VII, 'sewyd the
Kynge to be callyd Marchante Taylours'--evidently earning the disfavor
of their neighbors, for a 'grete grudge rose among dyuers other craftys
in the cyte against them.' Very soon, I fancy, these Marchante Taylours
began to pride themselves on the straightness of their legs, and let
subordinate craftsmen stretch their sartorius muscles. But why, as
Carlyle puts it, the idea had 'gone abroad, and fixed itself down in a
wide-spreading rooted error, that Tailors are a distin