The English nation had decreed through its legislature, that the evacuation of the country should be conducted with pageantry, that the solemn parting should be enrolled in all time honored ceremony and stately pomp with which kings had been crowned, and for which, with all its heart and mind, the English nature cries out with unappeasible hunger. So the moment for the King’s departure, which meant the official desertion of the Old Home, might be justly compared to the flight of the queen bee in the bee colony when her faithful followers swarm after and upon her, and with resolute constancy create a new city about her inviolable person. The King was to leave England in June, 1910, and when he left with sumptuous and melancholy observance, with splendor of color and depth and power of music, with uniform and ritual, with prayer and chorus and prophecy, with august and intolerable grandeur, with the art of tradition and the ornaments of invention, he was to pass down to Tilbury and sail away beyond Gravesend to the new realm of his possession on the shores of Australia. It was a pretty hard thing to believe; it was a harder thing to do. But it was to be done with all the gorgeous effectiveness which accumulated traditions of centuries and the practice of every day and the mere resources in artifices and equipment of a magnificent realm could display. The day came with splendid beauty, the sun shone over an England which somewhat returned to the flowery loveliness of its olden sweet estate. The city had been cleared, though the snowfalls had reached the most unexpected depth, and the severity of the winter had been appalling. The meteorologists discovered the fact that the western and northwestern zones of extreme precipitation, those of eighty inches had moved inward, and had even exceeded this maximum, and the condition of the country was really extraordinary and desperate. The immense accumulations of snow in the outlying districts had risen to such heights that the low, long houses of the peasantry were covered and the aspect of the country was that of a Labrador landscape transplanted to southern latitudes, where trees, stone walls and villages assumed the place of the more familiar tundra, plains and stone floored plains. Suffering had been very general, and the importunity of nature had done more to convince the people that the necessity of removal was an actual threat, not to be avoided or placated, than the speeches, the tracts of the scientific societies, or the deliberations of statesmen and editors. But in London, on this twentieth of June, though the air bore the strange traces of the changed climate, in its tingling sharpness, yet this exhilaration only served the purpose of adding swiftness to the movement of the hosts of people in the streets, and a new and wonderful tremor of excitement to their eagerness in awaiting the development of the day’s great preparations.