We learn from these tailors’ bills that tailors’ work embraced far more articles than to-day; in the _Orbis Sensualium Pictus_, 1659, a tailor’s shop has hanging upon the wall woollen hats, breeches, waistcoats, jackets, women’s cloaks, and petticoats. There are also either long hose or lasts for stretching hose, for they made stockings, leggins, gaiters, buskins; also a number of boxes which look like muff-boxes. One tailor at work is seated upon a platform raised about a foot from the floor. His seat is a curious bench with two legs about two feet long and two about one foot long. The base of the two long legs are on the floor, the other two set upon the platform. The tailor’s feet are on the platform, thus his work is held well up before his face. Sometimes his legs are crossed upon the platform in front of him. The platform was necessary, or, at any rate, advisable for another reason. The habits of Englishmen at that time, their manners and customs, I mean, were not tidy; and floors were very dirty. Any garment resting on the floor would have been too soiled for a gentleman’s wear before it was donned at all. I have discovered one thing about old-time tailors,—they were just as trying as their successors, and had as many tricks of trade. A writer in 1582 says, “If a tailor makes your gown too little, he covers his fault with a broad stomacher; if too great, with a number of pleats; if too short, with a fine guard; if too long with a false gathering.” In several of the household accounts of colonial dames which I have examined I have found the prices and items very confusing and irregular when compared with tailors’ bills and descriptive notes and letters accompanying them. And in one case I was fain to believe that the lady’s account-book had been kept upon the plan devised by the simple Mrs. Pepys,—a plan which did anger her spouse Samuel “most mightily.” He was filled with admiration of her household-lists—her kitchen accounts. He admired in the modern sense of the word “admire”; then he admired in the old-time meaning—of suspicious wonder. For albeit she could do through his strenuous teaching but simple sums in “Arithmetique,” had never even attempted long division, yet she always rendered to her husband perfectly balanced accounts, month after month. At last, to his angry queries, she whimpered that “whenever she doe misse a sum of money, she do add some sums to other things,” till she made it perfectly correct in her book—a piece of such simple duplicity that I wonder her husband had not suspected it months before. And she also revealed to him that she “would lay aside money for a necklace” by pretending to pay more for household supplies than she really had, and then tying up the extra amount in a stocking foot. He writes, “I find she is very cunning and when she makes least show hath her wits at work; and _so_ to my office to my accounts.”