There was so much happening everywhere in the world during those fateful weeks that followed February 10, 1953--events so startling, amazing, so stupendous of import, and of such diversity that I scarce know how to recount them. Of necessity my mention of many must be brief; and my picture of the whole, I fear, will be at best incoherent. Yet in that quality, at least, it will be a true picture; the world was incoherent, chaotic--everywhere a chaos of events unprecedented, uncontrollable. And in the chaos which swept Freddie and me away, the news from Dan Cain in Porto Rico, important though it was, at the time concerned us little. Father was in constant communication with the Cains; and later, after father had gone to Miami when the Federal capital was moved there in flight from Washington, he went to Porto Rico. The announcement that our world was to have such different days and nights, and a climate so utterly changed, struck the public with horror. It is not my purpose to try to detail or to picture it. The chaos everywhere; the paralyzation of industry throughout the northern hemisphere which so far had been proceeding by man's will against all the invading efforts of nature to wreck it; the panics that took place in all the northern cities--crowds of refugees struggling to get south; inadequate transportation; accidents; and a horrible crime-wave that swept unchecked over every one of the large population centers. Human activities in our modern world are very widely diversified; more widely varied--and yet more intermingled, more interdependent--than any one realizes until there comes an upset from the normal. There is, in these modern times, nothing that anyone does which does not almost immediately affect what some one else is doing. Had the change come slowly, spread over a hundred, or a thousand or a hundred thousand years as other great world changes have come and passed, conditions would have adjusted themselves. No one would even have noticed the change. But this was happening in minutes where others had taken centuries. New York, London, Paris and all the cities of the north were doomed to six months of twilight and night and blighting cold. Snow now was upon land, millions of acres of land, where crops soon would have been growing if millions of people were to have food. Yet now we know those millions of acres would be for months snow-buried. Millions of homes soon would be without adequate heat or light; and the people without adequate clothing. Rivers upon which the great power plants depended were congealing into ice. This for the north, with business, industry and nearly every human activity paralyzed by the sudden public horror. But in the south, from the Equator to the South Pole, lay the land of promise. Or at least the public thought so.