St. Petersburg contains a powerful enemy to all those receiving four hundred rubles a year salary or thereabouts. This foe is none other than our northern cold, though otherwise it is said to be very healthy. At nine o’clock in the morning, precisely at the hour when the streets are filled with officials on their way to their departments, the cold begins to give them all, without discrimination, such powerful and biting nips upon their noses that the poor officials are at a loss where to hide them. At such a time, when even those occupying superior positions suffer the pain of cold in their foreheads, and tears start to their eyes, the poor titular councillors are sometimes unprotected. Their only salvation lies in their ability to scamper quickly over five or six streets in their scant cloaks, and then warm their feet in the porter’s room; incidentally thawing out in the process all their faculties and abilities for official service which had become frozen on the way. Akaki Akakievich had for some time felt the cold piercing his back and shoulders with unwonted vigor, notwithstanding the fact that he tried to cover the distance from his house to the department as quickly as possible. He finally thought to see whether the fault did not lie in his cloak. Examining the garment very carefully at home, he made a discovery: that in two or three places--to be precise, in the back and shoulders--it had become like a thin canvas; the cloth, in fact, was threadbare to the point of transparency, while the lining too had gone to pieces. It should be mentioned that the cloak of Akaki Akakievich served as an object of ridicule to the officials; they even had deprived it of the dignified name of cloak and called it a cape. To confess the truth, it was of a rather curious construction; year by year its collar diminished more and more, because it served to patch other parts. The patching itself did not exhibit much sartorial art; and was, in fact, ill done and ugly. Seeing where the trouble lay, Akaki Akakievich decided to take the cloak to Petrovich, a tailor who lived somewhere on the fourth floor, up a dark staircase, and who, notwithstanding his one eye and pockmarked face, busied himself, with fair success, mending trousers and frocks of officials and others; that is to say, when he was in sober condition and was not up to something or other.