Letters from the Red Lion

Text 1: Ned and the letter bag, by Martha Greengrass

An original letter written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.

Letters for our village come no further than the Red Lion at Stoke, four miles off, and from there they are brought on by whichever boy the landlord can spare. This winter it has been young Ned Prior, who walks the road in all weathers with the bag strapped across his chest under his coat. He is paid a halfpenny a letter by those who receive them, and nothing at all when he arrives with an empty bag. Twice in January the snow lay so deep that he came by the field paths, keeping to the hedges where the drifts were thinnest. My mother always gives him a cup of hot milk before he goes on, though she has had no letter since Christmas.

Give one phrase that shows Ned tries to keep the letters dry.