On February 12th I started on my first provincial lecturing tour, and after speaking at Birkenhead that evening went on by the night mail to Glasgow.  Some races—­dog races—­I think, had been going on, and very unpleasant were many of the passengers waiting on the platform.  Some Birkenhead friends had secured me a compartment, and watched over me till the train began to move.  Then, after we had fairly started, the door was flung open by a porter, and a man was thrust in who half tumbled on to the seat.  As he slowly recovered he stood up, and as his money rolled out of his hand on to the floor, and he gazed vaguely at it, I saw to my horror that he was drunk.  The position was not pleasant, for the train was an express, and was not timed to stop for a considerable time.  My odious fellow-passenger spent some time on the floor, hunting after his scattered coins; then he slowly gathered himself up and presently became conscious of my presence.  He studied me for some time, and then proposed to shut the window.  I assented quietly, not wanting to discuss a trifle and feeling in deadly terror—­alone at night in an express with a man not drunk enough to be helpless, but too drunk to be controlled.  Never before nor since have I felt so thoroughly frightened.  I can see him still, swaying as he stood, with eyes bleared and pendulous lips—­but I sat there quiet and outwardly unmoved, as is always my impulse in danger till I see some way of escape, only grasping a penknife in my pocket, with a desperate resolve to use my feeble weapon as soon as the need arose.  The man came towards me with a fatuous leer, when a jarring noise was heard and the train began to slacken.

“What is that?” stammered my drunken companion.

“They are putting on the brakes to stop the train,” I answered very slowly and distinctly, though a very passion of relief made it hard to say quietly the measured words.

The man sat down stupidly, staring at me, and in a minute or two the train pulled up at a station—­it had been stopped by signal.  My immobility was gone.  In a moment I was at the window, called the guard, and explained rapidly that I was a woman travelling alone, and that a half-drunken man was in the carriage.  With the usual kindness of a railway official, he at once moved me and my baggage into another compartment, into which he locked me, and he kept a friendly watch over me at every station at which we stopped until he landed me safely at Glasgow.

At Glasgow a room had been taken for me at a temperance hotel, and it seemed to me so new and lonely a thing to be “all on my own account” in a strange hotel in a strange city, that I wanted to sit down and cry.  This feeling, to which I was too proud to yield, was probably partly due to the extreme greyness and grubbiness of my surroundings.  Things are better now, but in those days temperance hotels were for the most part lacking in cleanliness.  Abstinence from alcohol and a superfluity of “matter in