Forty Minutes Late

A snowbound railway trip leaves an experienced lecturer struggling to reach his evening engagement at Sheffield. After a hurried change of trains at Bondville Junction, he expects a carriage, dinner and a comfortable reception. Instead, he steps into a dark, frozen landscape with two heavy bags and an umbrella. A distant farmhouse light becomes his best hope as he stumbles along a fence through the drifts, still determined to arrive before his waiting audience gives up.

Francis Hopkinson Smith builds this short comic story around the gap between professional expectations and the awkward details of travel. The lecturer tells his own troubles with elaborate comparisons, rising indignation and a sharp eye for clothes, voices and manners. At the hall, a manager's complaint about his lateness brings that temper to the surface. Readers can enjoy the brisk dialogue and the narrator's growing certainty that everyone else has mishandled the arrangements.