“Nothing at all, sir,” he said hastily; and now I knew he was flurried.  “I can fix that, sir—­in a jiffy, sir.”

“Anyhow, please come round here in front where I can converse more freely with you on the subject,” I said.  I was becoming suspicious that all was not well with me back there where he was lingering.  He came reluctantly, still half-embracing me with one arm.

Petulantly I wrestled my form free, and instantly those breeches seemed to leap outward in all directions away from me.  I grabbed for them, and barely in time I got a grip on the yawning top hem.  Peering down the cavelike orifice that now confronted me I beheld two spectral white columns, and recognized them as my own legs.  In the same instant, also, I realized what that hard clump against my spine was, because when he took his hand away the clump was gone.  He had been standing back there with some eight or nine inches of superfluous waistband bunched up in his fist.

The situation was embarrassing, and it would have been still more embarrassing had I elected to go forth wearing my breeches in their then state, because, to avoid talk, he would have had to go along too, walking immediately behind me and holding up the slack.  And such a spectacle, with me filling the tonneau and he back behind on the rumble, would have caused comment undoubtedly.

That pantsmaker was up a stump!  He looked reproachfully at me, chidingly at the breeches and sternly at the tapemeasure—­which he wore draped round his neck like a pet snake—­as though he felt convinced one of us was at fault, but could not be sure which one.

“I’m afraid, sir,” he said, “that your figure is changing.”

“I guess you’re right,” I replied with a soft sigh.  “As well as I can judge I’m not as tall as I was day before yesterday by at least eighteen inches.  And I’ve mislaid my diaphragm somewhere, haven’t I?”

“’Ave them off, please, sir,” he said resignedly.  “I’ll ’ave to alter them to conform, sir.  Come back to-morrow.”

I had them off and he altered them to conform, and I went back on the morrow; in fact I went back so often that after a while I became really quite attached to the place.  I felt almost like a member of the firm.  Between calls from me the cutter worked on those breeches.  He cut them up and he cut them down; he sheared the back away and shingled the front, and shifted the buttons to and fro.

Still, even after all this, they were not what I should term an unqualified success.  When I sat down in them they seemed to climb up on me so high, fore and aft, that I felt as short-waisted as a crush hat in a state of repose.  And the only way I could get my hands into the hip pockets of those breeches was to take the breeches off first.  As ear muffs they were fair but as hip pockets they were failures.  Finally I told him to send my breeches, just as they were, to my hotel address—­and I paid the bill.