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. There would also be a basin and pitcher the size of a cup and saucer, and a bed that sagged in the middle and was covered with a cotton quilt. The _Nautilus_ stopped at a gate, beyond which was a smaller Jacob's ladder leading to a white cottage. Was there nothing built on a level in Sheffield? I asked myself. The bags which had been hung on the shafts came first, then I, then the muffled head and cloak. Upward and onward again, through a door, past a pretty girl who stood with her hand on the knob in welcome, and into a hall. Here the girl helped unmummy her mother, and then turned up the hall-lamp. Oh, such a dear, sweet gray-haired old lady! The kind of an old lady you would have wanted to stay--not a night with--but a year. An old lady with plump fresh cheeks and soft brown eyes and a smile that warmed you through and through. And such an all-embracing restful room with its open wood fire, andirons and polished fender--and the plants and books and easy-chairs! And the cheer of it all!