al 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 t