"Right willingly, monsieur," I said, "and though my Latin grows rusty with disuse, yet I doubt not I can make a shift to understand at least one phrase in two." He departed to his room, returning ere long with a weighty tome with which, I could see, he was loth to part. Having bid each other adieu, he went from me, and since the hour was too late to permit of his riding forth that same night, he dismissed the man that had accompanied him from Torcy, and sought his bed. He rose betimes in the morning, and from my window I saw him ride eastward, leaving his baggage to be dispatched after him by the carrier. When I had seen him well upon his way I skipped into my clothes, having as yet stood unclad at the window, and made haste to find old Toutain the tailor, whom I knew very well, and who had his shop on one of the quays abutting on what they call the avant port. He broke out into ecstasies of delight on seeing me, but I cut him short, and told him in one brief minute what I required of him, which was that within five hours he should rig me in the full apparel of a student of medicine. He protested with great volubility and play of hands that it could not be done, whereupon I told him brutally of our English saying, that "a tailor is but the ninth part of a man," and so stung him into a better mind. In a trice I had chosen the stuff, and Toutain took my measurements, the while he put me through a stiff interrogatory as to my new profession, where I purposed to study, and what not. I leave you to guess what a rack I put my invention upon to satisfy him. Within a bare quarter of an hour afterwards I was back at the _Belle Etoile_, breaking my fast upon a savoury omelet and other comestibles that suit with the French palate better than with ours. Toutain himself brought me my new raiment half-an-hour before the term, by the which time I had made Stubbs shave off my infant beard and the mustachio that graced my lip. The stout little tailor preened himself like a cock robin when he beheld how becomingly his handiwork sat upon me, and departed gaily clinking the sound English nobles wherewith I paid him.