ling me further details would be conveyed to me by
mail. I went home in a dazed state. For the first time I was beginning
to learn something about an industry in which heretofore I had never
been interested. Especially was I struck by the difference now revealed
to me in the preliminary stages of the surgeons' business as compared
with their fellow experts in the allied cutting trades--tailors, for
instance, not to mention barbers. Every barber, you know, used to be a
surgeon, only he spelled it chirurgeon. Since then the two professions
have drifted far apart. Even a half-witted barber--the kind who always
has the first chair as you come into the shop--can easily spend ten
minutes of your time thinking of things he thinks you should have and
mentioning them to you one by one, whereas any good, live surgeon knows
what you have almost instantly.

As for the tailor--consider how wearisome are his methods when you
parallel them alongside the tremendous advances in this direction made
by the surgeon--how cumbersome and old-fashioned and tedious! Why, an
experienced surgeon has you all apart in half the time the tailor takes
up in deciding whether the vest shall fasten with five buttons or six.
Our own domestic tailors are bad enough in this regard and the Old World
tailors are even worse.

I remember a German tailor in Aix-la-Chapelle in the fall of 1914 who
undertook to build for me a suit suitable for visiting the battle lines
informally. He was the most literary tailor I ever met anywhere. He
would drape the material over my person and then take a piece of chalk
and write quite a nice long piece on me. Then he would rub it out and
write it all over again, but more fully. He kept this up at intervals of
every other day until he had writer's cramp. After that he used pins. He
would pin the seams together, uttering little soothing, clucking sounds
in German whenever a pin went through the goods and into me. The German
cluck is not so soothing as the cluck of the English-speaking peoples, I
find.

At the end of two long and trying weeks, which wore both of us down
noticeably, he had the job done. It was not an unqualified success. He
regarded is as a suit of clothes, but I knew better; it was a set of
slip covers, and if only I had been a two-seated runabout it would have
proved a perfect fit, I am sure; but I am a single-seated design and it
did not answer. I wore it to the war because I had nothing else to wear
that wou