There is in Petersburg a mighty foe of all who earn a meagre salary — the northern frost. Akaky began to feel that it bit him most cruelly across the back and shoulders, and he resolved that the fault must lie with his overcoat. At home he examined it and discovered that in two or three places the cloth had worn so thin that it let the wind through like gauze. His overcoat was the standing jest of the young clerks, who had robbed it even of the noble name of overcoat and called it a dressing-gown. So he bent his steps toward the tailor Petrovich, who lived somewhere up a black back staircase, and who, despite his single eye and the pockmarks over all his face, did a fair business in mending the trousers and coats of clerks. Akaky found him seated upon a wide table with his bare legs tucked under him. Petrovich took the overcoat, spread it over his knee, looked long at it, and shook his head. Then he declared that nothing could be done: the cloth was rotten; a patch would not hold; one must make a new overcoat. At the word "new" a mist swam before Akaky's eyes. "But how new?" he asked almost in a whisper. "I have no money for that." "A new one," repeated Petrovich with a barbarous calm, and named a price so terrible that Akaky cried out. Petrovich, it must be owned, loved a stiff bargain, and enjoyed beyond measure the dismay he had produced. For a long while the two of them haggled — Petrovich holding to his price, Akaky imploring him to lower it — but the tailor stood as firm as a rock, plainly proud of the very frightfulness of the sum he had named. There was nothing to be done: Akaky must find the money, or go without a back to his coat.