I brought them home with me.  On the day after my arrival I took them to my regular tailor and laid the case before him.  I tried them on for him and asked him to tell me, as man to man, whether anything could be done to make those garments habitable.  He called his cutter into consultation and they went over me carefully, meantime uttering those commiserating clucking sounds one tailor always utters when examining another tailor’s handiwork.  After this my tailor took a lump of chalk and charted out a kind of Queen Rosamond’s maze of crossmarks on my breeches and said I might leave them, and that if surgery could save them he would operate.  At any rate he guaranteed to cut them away sufficiently to admit of my breast bone coming out into the open once more.

In a week—­about—­he called me on the telephone and broke the sad news to me.  My English riding pants would never ride me again.  In using the shears he had made a fatal slip and had irreparably damaged them in an essential location.  However, he said I need not worry, because it might have been worse; from what he had already cut out of them he had garnered enough material to make me a neat outing coat, and by scrimping he thought he might get a waistcoat to match.

I have my English raincoat; it is still in a virgin state so far as wearing it is concerned.  I may yet wear it and I may not.  If I wear it and you meet me on the street—­and we are strangers—­you should experience no great difficulty in recognizing me.  Just start in at almost any spot on the outer orbit and walk round and round as though you were circling a sideshow tent looking for a chance to crawl under the canvas and see the curiosities for nothing; and after a while, if you keep on walking as directed, you will come to a person with a plain but subsantial face, and that will be me in my new English raincoat.  Then again I may wear it to a fancy-dress ball sometime.  In that case I shall stencil Pike’s Peak or Bust! on the sidebreadth and go as a prairie schooner.  If I can succeed in training a Missouri hound-dog to trail along immediately behind me the illusion will be perfect.

After these two experiences with the English tailor I gave up.  Instead of trying to wear the apparel of the foreigner I set myself to the study of it.  I would avoid falling into the habit of making comparisons between European institutions and American institutions that are forever favorable to the American side of the argument.  To my way of thinking there is oniy one class of tourist-Americans to be encountered abroad worse than the class who go into hysterical rapture over everything they see merely because it is European, and that is the class who condemn offhand everything they see and find fault with everything merely because it is not American.  But I must say that in the matter of outer habiliments the American man wins the decision on points nearly every whack.