t service to you. You notice that I
appear before you without a proper suit of clothes--a mark of respect
which every lecturer should pay his audience. You are also aware that I
am nearly an hour late. What I regret is, first, the cause of my frame
of mind, second, that you should have been kept waiting. Now, let me
tell you exactly what I have gone through, and I do it simply because
this is not the first time that this has happened to your lecturers, and
it ought to be your last. It certainly will be the last for me." Then
followed the whole incident, including the Immaculate's protest about my
being late, my explosion, etc., etc., even to the incident of my flask.

There was a dead silence--so dead and lifeless that I could not tell
whether they were offended or not; but I made my bow as usual, and began
my discourse.

The lecture over, the Immaculate paid me my fee with punctilious
courtesy, waiving the customary receipt; followed me to the cloak-room,
helped me on with my coat, picked up one of the bags,--an auditor the
other, and the two followed me down Jacob's ladder into the night.
Outside stood a sleigh shaped like the shell of Dr. Holmes's _Nautilus_,
its body hardly large enough to hold a four-months-old baby. This was
surrounded by half the audience, anxious, I afterward learned, for
a closer view of the man who had "sassed" the Manager. Some of them
expected it to continue.

I squeezed in beside the bags and was about to draw up the horse
blanket, when a voice rang out:

"Mis' Plimsole's goin' in that sleigh, too." It was at Mrs. Plimsole's
that I was to spend the night.

Then a faint voice answered back:

"No, I can just as well walk." She evidently knew the danger of sitting
next to an overcharged boiler.

Mrs. Plimsole!--a woman--walk--on a night like this--I was out of the
sleigh before she had ceased to speak.

"No, madam, you are going to do nothing of the kind; if anybody is to
walk it will be I; I'm getting used to it."

She allowed me to tuck her in. It was too dark for me to see what she
was like--she was so swathed and tied up. Being still mad--fires drawn
but still dangerous, I concluded that my companion was sour, and skinny,
with a parrot nose and one tooth gone. That I was to pass the night at
her house did not improve the estimate; there would be mottoes on the
walls--"What is home without a mother," and the like; tidies on the
chairs, and a red-hot stove smelling of drying socks