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 would stamp me as a
regular war correspondent, except, of course, my wrist watch; but
I shall not wear it to another war. War is terrible enough already;
and, besides, I have parted with it. On my way home through Holland
I gave that suit to a couple of poor Belgian refugees, and I presume
they are still wearing it.

So far as I have been able to observe, the surgeons and the tailors
of these times share but one common instinct: If you go to a new
surgeon or to a new tailor he is morally certain, after looking
you over, that the last surgeon you had or the last tailor, did
not do your cutting properly. There, however, is where the
resemblance ends. The tailor, as I remarked in effect just now,
wants an hour at least in which to decide how he may best cover
up and disguise the irregularities of the human form; in much less