"But you can come and talk to me," I said to him after ten minutes of it. "I only meant that I was going to set the pace."
"No, no, I like watching you. You do it so gracefully. This is my man," he explained to some children who were blackberrying. "He is just carrying my bag over the cliffs for me. No, he is not very strong."
"You wait," I growled.
John laughed. "Fifty minutes more," he said. And then after a little silence, "I think the bag-carrying profession is overrated. What made you take it up, my lad? The drink? Ah, just so. Dear, dear, what a lesson to all of us."
"There's a good time coming," I murmured to myself, and changed hands for the eighth time.
"I don't care what people say," said John, argumentatively; "brown and blue DO go together. If you wouldn't mind—"
For the tenth time I rammed the sharp corner of the bag into the back of my knee.
"There, that's what I mean. You see it perfectly like that—the brown against the blue of the flannel. Thank you very much."
I stumbled up a steep little bit of slippery grass, and told myself that in three-quarters of an hour I would get some of my own back again. He little knew how heavy that bag could become.
"They say," said John to the heavens, "that if you have weights in your hands you can jump these little eminences much more easily. I suppose one hand alone doesn't do. What a pity he didn't tell me before—I would have lent him another bag with pleasure."