The pressure of popular approval hastened, in the Parliament, the formulation of a plan for the slow and careful removal of the population. The Law of Exodus, as it was termed, was a thoroughly English legislative work. And that meant a wise, adequate and deliberate evacuation. It involved a re-tabulation, so to speak, of the wealth and occupations of the individuals of the country, and so adjusted their departure, their association, their duties, their facilities and trades, that the least competition would arise in the new quarters, and then they were also so distributed in the colonies, that they met the requirements of these, as it was ascertained, from the authorities, the latter demanded. Thousands upon thousands had already sailed away, forming for themselves combinations as their acquaintances and connexions permitted, and still other thousands, with property invested abroad made a home in the land in which their support lay. A singular consequence of the situation was the speculative gale it produced in America, where large amounts of unemployed or released capital took flight. It settled tumultuously in Wall Street, voraciously attacking every variety of security, and driving stock values out of sight in a tremendous boom that disconcerted the tried veterans of the famous mart. All the time the Londoner was himself gaining some convincing insight into the dread nature of the climatic change about him. The snows covered the greater part of the streets of London, the parks became desolate tracts, deserted, uncleared, unused, swept over by the freezing winds, and chased from end to end with buffeted wreaths of snow, whose ghostly swirling columns ran over the wintry exposures like a race of Titanic spirits, crossing each other in cyclonic confusion, or meeting in shivering collisions, dissolving in cloud-bursts of microscopic and penetrating needles of ice. The Thames was almost closed, the shipping stayed idle at the wharfs, almost unmitigated suffering spread among the poor, for miles the streets were only traversed by foot-paths worn by their occupants, and the strangest sights occurred in the smaller reservations like Lincoln Inn Fields, St. Paul’s Churchyard, the Temple Gardens, the Artillery Grounds, Finsbury Circus and other confined spaces. By a freak of circumstances, and the curious and entirely unexpected vagary of the winds, the snow piled up and up in these quarters, because of a peculiar inrush of wind from the converging streets around, and this sweeping effect continued until the mound of snow, circumvallating the buildings, reached to their windows or overtopped them, while in enclosures not pre-empted by buildings, as Highbury Fields, and the various cemeteries, the hills of snow formed colossal billows, which seemed like a phalanx of rigid waves tortured into fantastic pinnacles by the storms of wind. Such spectacles turned back the life-blood of the