He gave no thought to his dress. His uniform was not green, but rather a reddish-mealy color. Its collar was narrow and low, so that his neck, though not really long, seemed inordinately long as it projected from the collar, quite like the necks of the plaster cats with wagging heads that one sees carried upon the heads of foreign peddlers. And something always clung to his uniform; it was a bit of straw, or perhaps a thread. Besides, he had the unfortunate tendency, while walking in the street, to go past a window precisely at the moment when they threw out of it all kinds of rubbish; hence he always carried about on his hat pieces of melon-rind and articles of a similar nature. Not once in his life did he direct his attention upon what was happening daily in the street--quite unlike his colleague, the young official, whose glance was sufficiently far-reaching and keen to observe when any one’s trouser-straps became undone on the opposite sidewalk, which always called forth upon his face a smile of gratification. But Akaki Akakievich, when he happened to look at all, saw in everything only the clear, even strokes of his written lines, and only when, from goodness knows where, a horse’s head suddenly popped over his shoulder and sent a whole gust of wind from its nostrils into his face, did he begin to notice that he was not in the middle of a line, but in the middle of the street. On arriving home, he would sit down immediately at the table, gulp down quickly his cabbage-soup, eat a piece of meat with onion without noticing their taste, consuming everything--together with flies or anything else which the Lord happened to send at the moment. Becoming conscious of the swelling of his stomach, he would rise from the table, take down a bottle of ink, and begin to copy papers which he had brought home. If such were wanting, he had the habit of making a special copy for his personal gratification, particularly if the paper happened to be remarkable, not indeed so much on account of the beauty of its style, but of its being addressed to some new or important person.