It was fully understood that the evacuation was to be a sustained, gradual movement, with, however, an irreversible determination to make it finally complete. It was not believed that England had become utterly uninhabitable, or that some vestiges of its former occupation might not be still maintained. A part of the plan of evacuation involved an affectionate care of its greater monuments of architecture, if possible, though the fierceness of the winter winds augured unhappily for the success of this design. A regency of love at any rate was to be established, and as many links as possible of connection, sentimental and real, were to be left unbroken. And Edinburgh? Thomsen had woefully noted every day the scanty paragraphs which entered the papers, and which gave brief intimations of the devastating and continuous storms, which, through the winter, swept over Scotland. As if, in order that the impending changes might be most forcibly realized, and the loss of time averted from too leniently interpreting the enormous seasonal metamorphosis going on, nature had exhausted her power in developing disaster. Terrific gales had lashed the rocky coasts, fierce insatiable blizzards had devouringly raged in the interior, and the pitiless and untired skies had emptied avalanches of snow upon the southern counties of Scotland. Edinburgh became a storm centre. With whirling inconstancy the storms beat upon the doomed city from the East and West; buildings were almost buried in the banked up and superimposed drifts, crested ranges were in the streets, and palisades of snow tortured into fantastic shapes, towered over the outer eminences, fed from the blinding torrents of flakes driven off from the Pentland hills and the Salisbury Crags. These summits alone, in the whitened waste, lifted their scraped crowns to the thickened skies. Edinburgh had become a city of the Frost King, and his slumbering legions bivouacked on and around it, except when aroused to riotous commotions by the sudden descent of the whistling armies of the wind. These details were rather incoherently reported, as the spring advanced, and an occasional survivor from the north made his way out of the beleaguered capital. When the spring had fairly ripened into summer, an energetic effort was made to reach Edinburgh, and it succeeded. Scotland at that time became inundated, and though the enormous accumulations of snow refused at once to surrender their blockade, they were so deeply broached and undermined that the North British line pushed a train forward to the edge of the city, though unable to reach its depot in the heart of the city, by reason of the hammered wedge of snow which it encountered under the Castle’s cliffs.