The horseman dismounted, handed the reins to another page, and made a vast ceremony of unbuttoning his sleeves so that the cassock devolved into a cloak. He peeled off spatterdashes to reveal breeches and stockings that were only out-moded by six months to a year, and then found a coffee-house of his own, just across Pall Mall from the mysterious shop, along (therefore) the southern limit of St. James's Fields – one of those Fields that the Church of St. Martin had formerly been in the middle of. But now houses were being built all around it, enclosing a little rectangle of farmland rapidly being gardenized.