After a while Joe stopped, for he had run himself very near short of wind; and he began rather to think shame of shouting and bellering so at an old man, and him as whisht as a trout through it all.  And when Joe pulled in, he only said, as quietly as ever was, that Joe was a “natural curiosity.”

Joe didn’t know very well what this meant; but he thought it was sauce, and it had like to have set him off again; but he beat himself down as well as he could, and he said, “Have you any thing against me?  If you have, speak it out like a man; and don’t sit there twiddling your thumbs, and calling folks out of their names in this road.”  Then it came out plain enough.  All this ill-nature, Miss Sandal, was just because poor Joe hadn’t brought him the same stones as he had gathered on the fells; and he said that changing them was either a very dirty trick, or a very clumsy joke.

“Trick,” said Joe. “Joke, did you say?  It was ratherly past a joke to expect me to carry a load of broken stones all the way here, when there was plenty on the spot.  I’m not such a fool as you’ve taken me for,” said Joe.  The jolly-jist took off his spectacles, and glowered at Joe without them.  Then he put them on again, and glowered at Joe with them; and then he laughed, and asked Joe, if he thought there could be no difference in stones.  “Why!” answered Joe, “you hardly have the face to tell me that one bag of stones isn’t as good as another bag of stones; and surely to man you’ll never be so conceited as to say that you can break stones better than old Abraham Atchisson, who breaks them for his bread, and breaks them all day long and every day.”

With that the old man laughed again, and told Joe to sit down; and then he asked him what he thought made him take so much trouble seeking bits of stone on the fells, if he could get what he wanted on the road-side.  “Well,” Joe said, “if I must tell you the truth, I thought you were rather soft in the head; but it made no matter what I thought, so long as you paid me so well for going with you.”  As Joe said this, it came into his head that it was better to flatter a fool than to fight him; and after all, that there might be something in the old man liking stones of his own breaking better than those of other folks’ breaking.  We all think the most of what we have had a hand in ourselves, don’t we Miss Sandal?  It’s nothing but natural.  And as soon as this run, through Joe’s head, he found himself getting middling sorry for the old man; and he said, “What will you give me to get you your own bits of stones back again?”

He cocked up his ears at that, and asked if his “speciments,” as he called them, were safe.  “Ay,” said Joe, “they are safe enough.  Nobody hereabout thinks a little lot of stones worth meddling with, so long as they don’t lie in their road.”  With that the jolly-jist jumped up, and said Joe must have something to eat and drink.  Then