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--”