bravest, and converted the most recalcitrant objectors to the new view of the necessity of leaving the immemorial splendors of England’s Capital. It was a demoralizing and distressing picture of change, to visit the great docks on the Thames; the London docks, the Commercial and the West India docks, and in the place of the varied throngs, the miscellaneous rabble of laborers in which the forms, faces and even the dresses of the people of the world made a composite aggregate, which was a suggested reflex of the myriad-handed toil and industry of London, a significant hint of the immense wealth and opulent indulgence of the great metropolis--in place of all this, the harsh winds whistled over deserted yards, shrieked through the rigging of idle ships, or blew tempestuous volleys of rime and sleet across the river between Wapping and Rotherhithe. Before this awful change, English fortitude and confidence quailed, or wrapping itself in the reserve of bitterness and distrust, turned silently away, for an instant, at least, driven to confess that the time-honored legend of English destiny had become a perverted and silly shibboleth. February 12th, which has in meteorology, along with the twelfths of November, May and August, been isolated as the period of the ice saints, viz.: four periods characterized in an unaccountable manner by a fall in temperature--this 12th of February, 1910, had been determined by the Parliament for the closing of the great debate on the Motion of Evacuation. It was this night that Leacraft and Thomsen found so clear and cold, a keen and perilous intensity of cold probably never before experienced in the English islands, unless one, in his inenviable task of comparison could have found an equivalent in the Ice Age itself. When Leacraft and his companion attained the Victoria Tower, already the debate, on the motion which in an enlarged way had been before the English nation for more than a month, had reached its final stage. Balfour had been chosen to close, in a long peroration, the tremendous forensic display which had been limited to the walls of the Houses of Parliament. But it was only an episodic and distinguished incident in an argument which had convulsed every household in England, which had sent its clamorous assertions and appeals to the whole English-speaking people throughout the world, and which would, by all rational expectations, remain to the end of historic time the most startling venture in language, the most dramatic performance in oratory ever known.