"I am a sleeping partner," he would say, with that easy flow of egotistic confidence which is the surest way of learning somewhat of your neighbour's private affairs. "I am a sleeping partner at all times except the vintage, when I awake and ride round among the growers, to test their growth." It was too early yet for these journeys, for the grapes were hardly ripe. But any one who wished to move from place to place must needs do so in the saddle in a country where land is so valuable that the width of a road is grudged, and bridle-ways are deemed good enough for the passage of the long and narrow carts that carry wine. Ever since their somewhat precipitate departure from the Villa Cordouan at Royan, Dormer Colville and Barebone had been in company. They had stayed together, in one friend's house or another. Sometimes they enjoyed the hospitality of a château, and at others put up with the scanty accommodation of a priest's house or the apartment of a retired military officer, in one of those little towns of provincial France at which the cheap journalists of Paris are pleased to sneer without ceasing. They avoided the large towns with extraordinary care. "Why should we go to towns," asked Colville, jovially, "when we have business in the country and the sun is still high in the sky?" "Yes," he would reply to the questions of an indiscreet fellow-traveller, at table or on the road. "Yes; I am a buyer of wine. We are buyers of wine. We are travelling from place to place to watch the growth. For the wine is hidden in the grape, and the grape is ripening." And, as often as not, the chance acquaintance of an inn dejeuner would catch the phrase and repeat it thoughtfully. "Ah! is that so?" he would ask, with a sudden glance at Dormer Colville's companion, who had hitherto passed unobserved as the silent subordinate of a large buyer; learning his trade, no doubt. "The grape is ripening. Good!" And as sure as he seemed to be struck with this statement of a self-evident fact, he would, in the next few minutes, bring the numeral "nineteen"--_tant bien que mal_--into his conversation. "With nineteen days of sun, the vintage will be upon us," he would say; or, "I have but nineteen kilometres more of road before me to-day." Indeed, it frequently happened that the word came in very inappropriately, as if tugged heroically to the front by a clumsy conversationalist. There is no hazard of life so certain to discover sympathy or antagonism as travel--a fact which points to the wisdom of beginning married life with a journey. The majority of people like to know the worst at once. To travel, however, with Dormer Colville was a liberal education in the virtues. No man could be less selfish or less easily fatigued; which are the two bases upon which rest all the stumbling-blocks of travel.