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 chateau, 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.