esperate
resolve to use my feeble weapon as soon as the need arose. The man
came towards me with a fatuous leer, when a jarring noise was heard
and the train began to slacken.

"What is that?" stammered my drunken companion.

"They are putting on the brakes to stop the train," I answered very
slowly and distinctly, though a very passion of relief made it hard to
say quietly the measured words.

The man sat down stupidly, staring at me, and in a minute or two the
train pulled up at a station--it had been stopped by signal. My
immobility was gone. In a moment I was at the window, called the
guard, and explained rapidly that I was a woman travelling alone, and
that a half-drunken man was in the carriage. With the usual kindness
of a railway official, he at once moved me and my baggage into another
compartment, into which he locked me, and he kept a friendly watch
over me at every station at which we stopped until he landed me safely
at Glasgow.

At Glasgow a room had been taken for me at a temperance hotel, and it
seemed to me so new and lonely a thing to be "all on my own account"
in a strange hotel in a strange city, that I wanted to sit down and
cry. This feeling, to which I was too proud to yield, was probably
partly due to the extreme greyness and grubbiness of my surroundings.
Things are better now, but in those days temperance hotels were for
the most part lacking in cleanliness. Abstinence from alcohol and a
superfluity of "matter in the wrong place" do not seem necessary
correlatives, yet I rarely went to a temperance hotel in which water
was liberally used for other purposes than that of drinking. From
Glasgow I went north to Aberdeen, where I found a very stern and
critical audience. Not a sound broke the stillness as I walked up the
hall; not a sound as I ascended the platform and faced the people; the
canny Scot was not going to applaud a stranger at sight; he was going
to see what she was like first. In grim silence they listened; I could
not move them; they were granite like their own granite city, and I
felt I would like to take off my head and throw it at them, if only to
break that hard wall. After about twenty minutes, a fortunate phrase
drew a hiss from some child of the Covenanters. I made a quick retort,
there was a burst of cheering, and the granite vanished. Never after
that did I have to complain of the coldness of an Aberdeen audience.
Back to London from Aberdeen, and a long, weary journey i