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This same thought had passed through my own mind. The unusual exertion had started every pore in my body; the red-hot stove had put on the finishing touches and I was in a Russian bath. To face that wind meant all sorts of calamities.

The Madonna-like wife with the cherub in her arms rose to her feet.

“Would you mind wearing my fur tippet?” she said in her soft voice; “’tain’t much, but it ‘ud keep out the cold from yer neck and maybe this shawl’d help some, if I tied it round your shoulders. Father got his death ridin’ to the village when he was overhet.”

She put them on with her own hands, bless her kind heart! her husband holding the baby; then she followed me out into the cold and helped draw the horse-blanket over my knees; the man in the coon-skin cap lugging the bags and the umbrella.

I looked at my watch. After eight o’clock, and two miles to drive!

“Oh, I’ll git yer there,” came a voice from inside the fur overcoat. “Darter wanted to go, but I said ‘twarn’t no night to go nowhars. Got to see a man who owes me some money, or I’d stay home myself. Git up, Joe.”

It was marvellous, the intelligence of this man. More than marvellous when my again blinded eyes–the red flannel in the lamp helped–began to take in the landscape. Fences were evidently of no use to him; clumps of trees didn’t count. If he had a compass anywhere about his clothes, he never once consulted it. Drove right on–across trackless Siberian steppes; by the side of endless glaciers, and through primeval forests, his voice keeping up its volume of sound, as he laid bare for me the scandals of the village–particularly the fight going on between the two churches–one hard and one soft–this lecture course being one of the bones of contention.

I saved my voice and kept quiet. If a runner did not give out or “Joe” break a leg, we would reach the hall in time; half an hour late, perhaps–but in time; the man beside me had said so–and the man beside me knew.

With a turn of the fence–a new one had thrust its hands out of a drift–a big building–big in the white waste–loomed up. My companion flapped the reins the whole length of Joe’s back.

“Git up! No, by gosh!–they ain’t tired yet;–they’re still a-waitin’. See them lights–that’s the hall.”

I gave a sigh of relief. The ambitious young man with one ear open for stellar voices, and the overburdened John Bunyan, and any number of other short-winded pedestrians, could no longer monopolize the upward and onward literature of our own or former times. I too had arrived.

Another jerk to the right–a trot up an incline, and we stopped at a steep flight of steps–a regular Jacob’s-ladder flight–leading to a corridor dimly lighted by the flare of a single gas jet. Up this I stumbled, lugging the bags once more, my whole mind bent on reaching the platform at the earliest possible moment–a curious mental attitude, I am aware, for a man who had eaten nothing since noon, was still wet and shivering inside, and half frozen outside–nose, cheeks, and fingers—from a wind that cut like a circular saw.

As I landed the last bag on the top step–the fog-horn couldn’t leave his horse–I became conscious of the movements of a short, rotund, shad-shaped gentleman in immaculate white waistcoat, stiff choker and wide expanse of shirt front. He was approaching me from the door of the lecture hall in which sat the audience; then a clammy hand was thrust out–and a thin voice trickled this sentence:

“You’re considerable late sir–our people have been in their–“

“I am what!” I cried, straightening up.

“I said you were forty minutes late, sir. We expect our lecturers to be on–“

That was the fulminate that exploded the bomb. Up to now I had held myself in hand. I was carrying, I knew, 194 pounds of steam, and I also knew that one shovel more of coal would send the entire boiler into space, but through it all I had kept my hand on the safety-valve. It might have been the white waistcoat or the way the curved white collar cupped his billiard-ball of a chin, or it might have been the slight frown about his eyebrows, or the patronizing smile that drifted over his freshly laundered face; or it might have been the deprecating gesture with which he consulted his watch: whatever it was, out went the boiler.