I could not answer him at all for a while, I was laughing so, but, at
last, between my peals I managed to jerk out:
"It isn't my shirt - it's YOURS!"
I never saw a man's face change from lively to severe so suddenly in all
my life before.
"What!" he yelled, springing up. "You silly cuckoo! Why can't you be
more careful what you're doing? Why the deuce don't you go and dress on
the bank? You're not fit to be in a boat, you're not. Gimme the
hitcher."
I tried to make him see the fun of the thing, but he could not. George
is very dense at seeing a joke sometimes.
Harris proposed that we should have scrambled eggs for breakfast. He
said he would cook them. It seemed, from his account, that he was very
good at doing scrambled eggs. He often did them at picnics and when out
on yachts. He was quite famous for them. People who had once tasted his
scrambled eggs, so we gathered from his conversation, never cared for any
other food afterwards, but pined away and died when they could not get
them.
It made our mouths water to hear him talk about the things, and we handed
him out the stove and the frying-pan and all the eggs that had not
smashed and gone over everything in the hamper, and begged him to begin.
He had some trouble in breaking the eggs - or rather not so much trouble
in breaking them exactly as in getting them into the frying-pan when
broken, and keeping them off his trousers, and preventing them from
running up his sleeve; but he fixed some half-a-dozen into the pan at
last, and then squatted down by the side of the stove and chivied them
about with a fork.
It seemed harassing work, so far as George and I could judge. Whenever
he went near the pan he burned himself, and then he would drop everything
and dance round the stove, flicking his fingers about and cursing the
things. Indeed, every time George and I looked round at him he was sure
to be performing this feat. We thought at first that it was a necessary
part of the culinary arrangements.
We did not know what scrambled eggs were, and we fancied that it must be
some Red Indian or Sandwich Islands sort of dish that required dances and
incantations for its proper cooking. Montmorency went and put his nose
over it once, and the fat spluttered up and scalded him, and then he
began dancing and cursing. Altogether it was one of the most interesting
and exciting operations I have ever witnessed.
