e to time he is himself, unfortunately,
"pressed" owing to "large consignments from Europe." But
for these heavy consignments, I am sure I should never
need to pay him. It is true that I have sometimes thought
to observe that these consignments are apt to arrive when
I pass the limit of owing for two suits and order a third.
But this can only be a mere coincidence.

Yet the bill, as I say, is a thing that we never speak
of. Instead of it my tailor passes to the weather. Ordinary
people always begin with this topic. Tailors, I notice,
end with it. It is only broached after the suit is ordered,
never before.

"Pleasant weather we are having," he says. It is never
other, so I notice, with him. Perhaps the order of a suit
itself is a little beam of sunshine.

Then we move together towards the front of the store on
the way to the outer door.

"Nothing to-day, I suppose," says my tailor, "in shirtings?"

"No, thank you."

This is again a mere form. In thirty years I have never
bought any shirtings from him. Yet he asks the question
with the same winsomeness as he did thirty years ago.

"And nothing, I suppose, in collaring or in hosiery?"

This is again futile. Collars I buy elsewhere and hosiery
I have never worn.

Thus we walk to the door, in friendly colloquy. Somehow
if he failed to speak of shirtings and hosiery, I should
feel as if a familiar cord had broken;

At the door we part.

"Good afternoon," he says. "A week from Tuesday--yes
--good afternoon."

Such is--or was--our calm unsullied intercourse, unvaried
or at least broken only by consignments from Europe.

I say it _was_, that is until just the other day.

And then, coming to the familiar door, for my customary
summer suit, I found that he was there no more. There
were people in the store, unloading shelves and piling
cloth and taking stock. And they told me that he was
dead. It came to me with a strange shock. I had not
thought it possible. He seemed--he should have been
--immortal.

They said the worry of his business had helped to kill
him. I could not have believed it. It always seemed so
still and tranquil--weaving his tape about his neck and
marking measures and holding cloth against his leg beside
the sunlight of the window in the back part of the shop.
Can a man die of that? Yet he had been "going behind,"
they said (however that is done), for years. His wife,
they told me, would be left badly off. I had never
conceived him as h