Page:Travels with a Donkey In The Cevennes.djvu/13

Rh man." Neither of them could tie a knot that would hold, and the inventor of the revolving lights and countless scientific instruments would find himself helpless before the problem of cording a trunk, or even buttoning his own cuffs. I remember once, in an out-of-the-way place, my husband offering to carry wood from a distant pile as his share of the camp work, my sister and I to do the cooking. Our supply of fuel seeming very scant, we looked into the matter to find him plodding wearily back and forth, fetching a single stick at a time. He certainly never attained "that neat, hurried, bite-your-thread effect" that he so admired in Americans.

Kegan Paul not only paid twenty pounds for the Travels with a Donkey, but invited the author to dinner, where the shy young man suffered agonies of embarrassment over the claret that was served to the guests alone, Mr. Paul being an abstainer from principle. Would the acceptance, at his invitation, of the wine Mr. Paul thought it wrong to take, put Mr. Paul in a false position? And yet, on what grounds to refuse? This