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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Forty Minutes Late, by F. Hopkinson Smith
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Forty Minutes Late
+       1909
+
+Author: F. Hopkinson Smith
+
+Release Date: December 3, 2007 [EBook #23697]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FORTY MINUTES LATE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+
+FORTY MINUTES LATE
+
+By F. Hopkinson Smith
+
+1909
+
+
+It began to snow half an hour after the train started--a fine-grained,
+slanting, determined snow that forced its way between the bellows of the
+vestibules, and deposited itself in mounds of powdered salt all over the
+platforms and steps. Even the porter had caught some puffs on his
+depot coat with the red cape, and so had the conductor, from the way he
+thrashed his cap on the back of the seat in front of mine. "Yes,
+gettin' worse," he said in answer to an inquiring lift of my eyebrows.
+"Everything will be balled up if this keeps on."
+
+"Shall we make the connection at Bondville?" I was to lecture fifty
+miles from Bondville Junction, and had but half an hour lee-way.
+
+If the man with the punch heard, he made no answer. The least said
+the soonest mended in crises like this. If we arrived on time every
+passenger would grab his bag and bolt out without thanking him or the
+road, or the engineer who took the full blast of the storm on his chest
+and cheeks. If we missed the connection, any former hopeful word would
+only add another hot coal to everybody's anger.
+
+I fell back on the porter.
+
+"Yes' sir, she'll be layin' jes' 'cross de platform. She knows we're
+comin'. Sometimes she waits ten minutes--sometimes she don't; more times
+I seen her pullin' out while we was pullin' in."
+
+Not very reassuring this. Only one statement was of value--the position
+of the connecting train when we rolled into Bondville.
+
+I formulated a plan: The porter would take one bag, I the other--we
+would both stand on the lower step of the Pullman, then make a dash. If
+she was pulling out as we pulled in, a goatlike spring on my part might
+succeed; the bags being hurled after me to speed the animal's motion.
+
+One hour later we took up our position.
+
+"Dat's good!--Dar she is jes' movin' out: thank ye, sar. I got de
+bag--dis way!"
+
+There came a jolt, a Saturday-afternoon slide across the ice-covered
+platform, an outstretched greasy hand held down from the step of the
+moving train, followed by the chug of a bag that missed my knees by a
+hand's breadth--and I was hauled on board.
+
+The contrast between a warm, velvet-lined Pullman and a cane-seated car
+with both doors opened every ten minutes was anything but agreeable;
+but no discomfort should count when a lecturer is trying to make his
+connection. That is what he is paid for and that he must do at all
+hazards and at any cost, even to chartering a special train, the price
+devouring his fee.
+
+Once in my seat an account of stock was taken--two bags, an umbrella,
+overcoat, two gum shoes (one off, one on), manuscript of lecture in bag,
+eye-glasses in outside pocket of waistcoat. This over, I spread myself
+upon the cane seat and took in the situation. It was four o'clock (the
+lecture was at eight); Sheffield was two hours away; this would give
+time to change my dress and get something to eat. The committee,
+moreover, were to meet me at the depot with a carriage and drive me
+to where I was "to spend the night and dine"--so the chairman's letter
+read. The suppressed smile on the second conductor's face when he
+punched my ticket and read the name of "Sheffield" sent my hand into my
+pocket in search of this same letter. Yes--there was no mistake about
+it,--"Our carriage," it read, "will meet you," etc., etc.
+
+The confirmation brought with it a certain thrill; not a carriage picked
+up out of the street, or a lumbering omnibus--a mere go-between from
+station to hotels--but "our carriage!" Nothing like these lecture
+associations, I thought,--nothing like these committees, for making
+strangers comfortable. That was why it was often a real pleasure to
+appear before them. This one would, no doubt, receive me in a big yellow
+and white Colonial club-house built by the women of the town (I know of
+a dozen just such structures), with dressing and lunch rooms, spacious
+lecture hall, and janitor in gray edged with black.
+
+This thought called up my own responsibility in the matter; I was glad
+I had caught the train; it was a bad night to bring people out and then
+disappoint them, even if most of them did come in their own carriages.
+Then again, I had kept my word; none of my fault, of course, if I
+hadn't--but I had!--that was a source of satisfaction. Now that I
+thought of it, I had, in all my twenty years of lecturing, failed only
+twice to reach the platform. In one instance a bridge was washed away,
+and in the other my special train (the price I paid for that train still
+keeps me hot against the Trusts) ran into a snowdrift and stayed there
+until after midnight, instead of delivering me on time, as agreed. I had
+arrived late, of course, many times, gone without my supper often, and
+more than once had appeared without the proper habiliments--and I am
+particular about my dress coat and white waistcoat--but only twice had
+the gas been turned off and the people turned out. Another time I had--
+
+"Sheffield! Shef-fie-l-d! All out for Shef-f-i-e-l-d!" yelled the
+conductor.
+
+The two bags once more, the conductor helping me on with my overcoat,
+down the snow-blocked steps and out into the night.
+
+"Step lively!--more'n an hour late now."
+
+I looked about me. I was the only passenger. Not a light of any
+kind--not a building of any kind, sort, or description, except a box-car
+of a station set up on end, pitch dark inside and out, and shut tight.
+No carriage. No omnibus; nothing on runners; nothing on wheels. Only a
+dreary waste of white, roofed by a vast expanse of black.
+
+"Is this Sheffield?" I gasped.
+
+"Yes,--all there is here; the balance is two miles over the hills."
+
+"The town?"
+
+"Town?--no, the settlement;--ain't more's two dozen houses in it."
+
+"They were to send a carriage and--"
+
+"Yes--that's an old yarn--better foot it for short." Here he swung his
+lantern to the engineer craning his head from the cab of the locomotive,
+and sprang aboard. Then this fragment came whirling through the steam
+and smoke:--"There's a farmhouse somewhere's over the hill,--follow the
+fence and turn to--" the rest was lost in the roar of the on-speeding
+train.
+
+I am no longer young. Furthermore, I hate to carry things--bags
+especially. One bag might be possible--a very small one; two bags, both
+big, are an insult.
+
+I deposited the two outside the box-car, tried the doors, inserted
+my fingers under the sash of one window, looked at the chimney with a
+half-formed Santa Claus idea of scaling the roof and sliding down to
+some possible fireplace below; examined the wind-swept snow for carriage
+tracks, peered into the gloom, and, as a last resort, leaned up against
+the sheltered side of the box to think.
+
+There was no question that if a vehicle of any kind had been sent to
+meet me it had long since departed; the trackless roadway showed that.
+It was equally evident that if one was coming, I had better meet it on
+the way than stay where I was and freeze to death. The fence was still
+visible--the near end--and there was a farmhouse somewhere--so the
+conductor had said, and he seemed to be an honest, truthful man. Whether
+to right or left of the invisible road, the noise of the train and the
+howl of the wind had prevented my knowing--but _somewhere's_--That was a
+consolation.
+
+The bags were the most serious obstacles. If I carried one in each hand
+the umbrella would have to be cached, for some future relief expedition
+to find in the spring.
+
+There _was_ a way, of course, to carry bags--any number of bags. All
+that was needed was a leather strap with a buckle at each end; I had
+helped to hang half a dozen bags across the shoulders of as many porters
+meeting trains all over Europe. Of course, I didn't wear leather straps.
+Suspenders were my stronghold. They might!--No, it was too cold to get
+at them in that wind. And if I did they were of the springy, wabbly kind
+that would seesaw the load from my hips to my calves.
+
+The only thing was to press on. Some one had blundered, of course.
+
+"Half a league, half a league--into the jaws," etc.
+
+"Theirs not to reason why--" But my duty was plain; the audience were
+already assembling; the early ones in their seats by this time.
+
+Then an inspiration surged through me. Why not slip the umbrella through
+the handle of one bag, as Pat carries his shillalah and bundle of duds,
+and grab the other in my free hand! Our carriage couldn't be far off.
+The exercise would keep my blood active and my feet from freezing, and
+as to the road, was there not the fence, its top rail making rabbit
+jumps above the drifts?
+
+So I trudged on, stumbling into holes, flopping into treacherous ruts,
+halting in the steeper places to catch my breath, till I reached the top
+of the hill. There I halted--stopped short, in fact: the fence had given
+out! In its place was a treacherous line of bushes that faded into a
+delusive clump of trees. Beyond, and on both sides, stretched a great
+white silence--still as death.
+
+Another council of war. I could retrace my steps, smash in the windows
+of the station, and camp for the night, taking my chances of stopping
+some east-bound train as it whizzed past, with a match and my
+necktie--or I could stumble on, perhaps in a circle, and be found in
+the morning by the early milk.
+
+On! On once more--maybe the clump of trees hid something--maybe--
+
+Here a light flashed--a mere speck of a light--not to the right, where
+lay the clump of trees--but to my left; then a faint wave of warm color
+rose from a chimney and curled over a low roof buried in snow. Again the
+light flashed--this time through a window with four panes of glass--each
+one a beacon to a storm-tossed mariner!
+
+On once more--into a low hollow--up a steep slope--slipping, falling,
+shoving the hand-gripped bag ahead of me to help my footing, until I
+reached a snow-choked porch and a closed door.
+
+Here I knocked.
+
+For some seconds there was no sound; then came a heavy tread, and a man
+in overalls threw wide the door.
+
+"Well, what do you want at this time of night?" (Time of night, and it
+but seven-thirty!)
+
+"I'm the lecturer," I panted.
+
+"Oh, come! Ain't they sent for ye? Here, I'll take 'em. Walk in and
+welcome. You look beat out. Well--well--wife and I was won-derin' why
+nothin' driv past for the six-ten. We knowed you was comin'. Then agin,
+the station master's sick, and I 'spose ye couldn't warm up none. And
+they ain't sent for ye? And they let ye tramp all--Well--well!"
+
+I did not answer. I hadn't breath enough left for sustained
+conversation; moreover, there was a red-hot stove ahead of me, and a
+rocking-chair,--comforts I had never expected to see again--and there
+was a pine table--oh, a lovely pine table, with a most exquisite white
+oil-cloth cover, holding the most beautiful kerosene lamp with a
+piece of glorious red flannel floating in its amber fluid; and in the
+corner--a wife--a sweet-faced, angelic-looking young wife, with a baby
+in her arms too beautiful for words--must have been!
+
+I dropped into the chair, spread my fingers to the stove and looked
+around--warmth--rest-peace--comfort--companionship--all in a minute!
+
+"No, they didn't send anything," I wheezed when my breath came. "The
+conductor told me I should find the farmhouse over the hill--and--"
+
+"Yes, that's so; it's back a piece, you must have missed it."
+
+"Yes--I must have missed it," I continued in a dazed way.
+
+"The folks at the farmhouse is goin' to hear ye speak, so they told me.
+Must be startin' now."
+
+"Would you please let them know I am here, and--"
+
+"Sure! Wait till I get on my boots! Hello!--that's him now."
+
+Again the door swung wide. This time it let in a fur overcoat, coon-skin
+cap, two gray yarn mittens, a pair of raw-beefsteak cheeks and a voice
+like a fog-horn.
+
+"Didn't send for ye? Wall, I'll be gol-durned! And yer had to fut it?
+Well, don' that beat all. And yer ain't the fust one they've left down
+here to get up the best way they could. Last winter--Jan'ry, warn't it,
+Bill?" Bill nodded--"there come a woman from New York and they dumped
+her out jes' same as you. I happened to come along in time, as luck
+would have it--I was haulin' a load of timber on my bob-sled--and there
+warn't nothin' else, so I took her up to the village. She got in late,
+of course, but they was a-waitin' for her. I really wasn't goin' to hear
+you speak to-night--we git so much of that sort of thing since the old
+man who left the money to pay you fellers for talkin' died--been goin'
+on ten years now--but I'll take yer 'long with me, and glad to. But yer
+oughter have somethin' warmer'n what yer got on. Wind's kinder nippy
+down here, but it ain't nothin' to the way it bites up on the ridge."
+
+This same thought had passed through my own mind. The unusual exertion
+had started every pore in my body; the red-hot stove had put on the
+finishing touches and I was in a Russian bath. To face that wind meant
+all sorts of calamities.
+
+The Madonna-like wife with the cherub in her arms rose to her feet.
+
+"Would you mind wearing my fur tippet?" she said in her soft voice;
+"'tain't much, but it 'ud keep out the cold from yer neck and maybe this
+shawl'd help some, if I tied it round your shoulders. Father got his
+death ridin' to the village when he was overhet."
+
+She put them on with her own hands, bless her kind heart! her husband
+holding the baby; then she followed me out into the cold and helped draw
+the horse-blanket over my knees; the man in the coon-skin cap lugging
+the bags and the umbrella.
+
+I looked at my watch. After eight o'clock, and two miles to drive!
+
+"Oh, I'll git yer there," came a voice from inside the fur overcoat.
+"Darter wanted to go, but I said 'twarn't no night to go nowhars. Got to
+see a man who owes me some money, or I'd stay home myself. Git up, Joe."
+
+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--"
+
+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 the white waistcoat or the way the curved white collar
+cupped his billiard-ball of a chin, or it might have been the slight
+frown about his eyebrows, or the patronizing smile that drifted over his
+freshly laundered face; or it might have been the deprecating gesture
+with which he consulted his watch: whatever it was, out went the boiler.
+
+"Late! Are you the man that's running this lecture course?"
+
+"Well, sir, I have the management of it."
+
+"You have, have you? Then permit me to tell you right here, my friend,
+that you ought to sublet the contract to a five-year-old boy. You let me
+get out in the cold--send no conveyance as you agreed--"
+
+"We sent our wagon, sir, to the station. You could have gone in
+and warmed yourself, and if it had not arrived you could have
+telephoned--the station is always warm."
+
+"You have the impudence to tell me that I don't know whether a station
+is closed or not, and that I can't see a wagon when it is hauled up
+alongside a depot?"
+
+The clammy hands went up in protest: "If you will listen, sir, I will--"
+
+"No, sir, I will listen to nothing." and I forged ahead into a small
+room where five or six belated people were hanging up their coats and
+hats.
+
+But the Immaculate still persisted:
+
+"This is not where--Will you come into the dressing-room, sir? We have a
+nice warm room for the lecturers on the other side of the--"
+
+"No--sir; I won't go another step, except on to that platform, and I'm
+not very anxious now to get there--not until I put something inside
+of me--" (here I unstrapped my bag) "to save me from an attack of
+pneumonia." (I had my flask out now and the cup filled to the brim.)
+"When I think of how hard I worked to get here and how little you--"
+(and down it went at one gulp).
+
+The expression of disgust that wrinkled the placid face of the
+Immaculate as the half-empty flask went back to its place, was
+pathetic--but I wouldn't have given him a drop to have saved his life.
+
+I turned on him again.
+
+"Do you think it would be possible to get a vehicle of any kind to take
+me where I am to sleep?"
+
+"I think so, sir." His self-control was admirable.
+
+"Well, will you please do it?"
+
+"A sleigh has already been ordered, sir." This came through tightly
+closed lips.
+
+"All right. Now down which aisle is the entrance to the platform?"
+
+"This way, sir." The highest glacier on Mont Blanc couldn't have been
+colder or more impassive.
+
+Just here a calming thought wedged itself into my brain-storm. These
+patient, long-suffering people were not to blame; many of them had come
+several miles through the storm to hear me speak and were entitled to
+the best that was in me. To vent upon them my spent steam because--No,
+that was impossible.
+
+"Hold on, my friend," I said, "stop where you are, let me pull myself
+together. This isn't their fault--" We were passing behind the screen
+hiding the little stage.
+
+But he didn't hold on; he marched straight ahead; so did I, past the
+pitcher of ice water and the two last winter's palms, where he motioned
+me to a chair.
+
+His introduction was not long, nor was it discursive. There was nothing
+eulogistic of my various acquirements, occupations, talents; no remark
+about the optimistic trend of my literature, the affection in which my
+characters were held; nothing of this at all. Nor did I expect it. What
+interested me more was the man himself.
+
+The steam of my wrath had blurred his outline and make-up before; now I
+got a closer, although a side, view of his person. He was a short man,
+much thicker at the middle than he was at either end--a defect all the
+more apparent by reason of a long-tailed, high-waisted, unbuttonable
+black coat which, while it covered his back and sides, would have left
+his front exposed, but for his snowy white waistcoat, which burst like a
+ball of cotton from its pod.
+
+His only gesture was the putting together of his ten fingers, opening
+and touching them again to accentuate his sentences. What passed through
+my mind as I sat and watched him, was not the audience, nor what I
+was going to say to them, but the Christianlike self-control of this
+gentleman--a control which seemed to carry with it a studied reproof.
+Under its influence I unconsciously closed both furnace doors and opened
+my forced draft. Even then I should have reached for the safety-valve,
+but for an oily, martyr-like smile which flickered across his face,
+accompanied by a deprecating movement of his elbows, both indicating his
+patience under prolonged suffering, and his instant readiness to turn
+the other cheek if further smiting on my part was in store for him. I
+strode to the edge of the platform: "I know, good people," I exploded,
+"that you are not responsible for what has happened, but I want to tell
+you before I begin, that I have been boiling mad for ten minutes and am
+still at white heat, and that it is going to take me some time to get
+cool enough to be of the slightest 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. 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!
+
+"Now you just sit there and get comfortable," she said, patting my
+shoulder--(the second time in one night that a woman's hand had been
+that of an angel). "Maggie'll get you some supper. We had it all ready,
+expecting you on the six-ten. Hungry, aren't you?"
+
+Hungry! I could have gnawed a hole in a sofa to get at the straw
+stuffing.
+
+She drew up a chair, waited till her daughter had left the room, and
+said with a twinkle in her eyes:
+
+"Oh, I was glad you gave it to 'em the way you did, and when you sailed
+into that snivelling old Hard-shell deacon, I just put my hands down
+under my petticoats and clapped them for joy. There isn't anybody
+running anything up here. They don't have to pay for this lecture
+course. It was given to them by a man who is dead. All they think
+they've got to do is to dress themselves up. They're all officers;
+there's a recording secretary and a corresponding secretary and an
+executive committee and a president and two vice-presidents, and a lot
+more that I can't remember. Everyone of them is leaving everything
+to somebody else to attend to. I know, because I take care of all the
+lecturers that come. Only last winter a lady lecturer arrived here on a
+load of wood; she didn't lose her temper and get mad like you did. Maybe
+you know her; she told us all about the Indians and her husband, the
+great general, who was surrounded and massacred by them."
+
+"Know her, Madam, not only do I know and love her, but the whole country
+loves her. She is a saint, Madam, that the good Lord only allows to live
+in this world because if she was transferred there would be no standard
+left."
+
+"Yes, but then you had considerable cause. The hired girl next door--she
+sat next to my daughter--said she didn't blame you a mite." (Somebody
+was on my side, anyhow.) "Now come in to supper."
+
+The next morning I was up at dawn: I had to get up at dawn because the
+omnibus made only one trip to the station, to catch the seven-o'clock
+train. I went by the eight-ten, but a little thing like that never makes
+any difference in Sheffield.
+
+When the omnibus arrived it came on runners. Closer examination from the
+window of the cosey room--the bedroom was even more delightful--revealed
+a square furniture van covered on the outside with white canvas, the
+door being in the middle, like a box-car. I bade the dear old lady and
+her daughter good-by, opened the hall door and stood on the top step.
+The driver, a stout, fat-faced fellow, looked up with an inquiring
+glance.
+
+"Nice morning," I cried in my customary cheerful tone--the dear woman
+had wrought the change.
+
+"You bet! Got over your mad?"
+
+The explosion had evidently been heard all over the village.
+
+"Yes," I laughed, as I crawled in beside two other passengers.
+
+"You was considerable het up last night, so Si was tellin' me," remarked
+the passenger, helping me with one bag.
+
+I nodded. Who Si might be was not of special interest, and then again
+the subject had now lost its inflammatory feature.
+
+The woman made no remark; she was evidently one of the secretaries.
+
+"Well, by gum, if they had left me where they left you last night, and
+you a plumb stranger, I'd rared and pitched a little myself," continued
+the man. "When you come again--"
+
+"Come again! Not by a--"
+
+"Oh, yes, you will. You did them Hard-shells a lot of good! You just bet
+your bottom dollar they'll look out for the next one of you fellows that
+comes up here!"
+
+The woman continued silent. She would have something to say about any
+return visit of mine, and she intended to say it out loud if the time
+ever came!
+
+The station now loomed into sight. I sprang out and tried the knob. I
+knew all about that knob--every twist and turn of it.
+
+"Locked again!" I shouted, "and I've got to wait here an hour in this--"
+
+"Hold on--_hold on_--" shouted back the driver. "Don't break loose
+again. I got the key."
+
+My mail a week later brought me a county paper containing this
+statement: "The last lecturer, owing to some error on the part of the
+committee, was not met at the train and was considerably vexed. He said
+so to the audience and to the committee. Everybody was satisfied with
+his talk until they heard what they had to pay for it. He also said that
+he had left his dress suit in his trunk. If what we hear is true, he
+left his manners with it." On reflection, the editor was right--_I had_.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Forty Minutes Late, by F. Hopkinson Smith
+
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