The statesmen and economists were more useful. They estimated the results of any continued lowering of the temperatures, the effects of climatic alterations on life and production, especially in grain, and found that the southern countries of Europe were in some danger, and the northern countries very really threatened with a commercial overthrow, as England had been. They too turned to the colonies of their respective countries for refuge. It looked as if the bursting receptacles of European Culture were about to explode and scatter over the ends of the world the germinal seeds of its civilization. CHAPTER X. ADDENDUM. “Histories leave oppressive legacies behind them. They may furnish subjects for art and literature and poetry, but, as in family inheritance, they burden posterity with considerable rubbish. Society does not quickly free itself from superstition, nor from its habits of thinking or of doing things. Even when they become anachronisms we are loathe to part from them, because, to our own detriment, we are fond of them. America has started fresh, and runs on the road of opportunity, while other nations must hobble and limp as best they can, with the clogs of old usage and prejudice hanging on their feet.” It was the voice of our friend Leacraft, and he was standing on a broad piazza built at the rear of a spacious villa on the topmost slopes of Staten Island, in the harbor of New York city, looking at the motionless ocean far beyond the fringe of land immediately before him, flushed by the setting sun. That luminary with glorious opulence had painted the sky a seething carmine in the west, and imparted its most delicate reminders of the morn to the eastern arches of the heavens, that hung above the sea. The picture was superbly satisfying. There was enough detail in the landscape, enough isolation of house and wood and field, of moor and strand, and not too much. The oncoming twilight softly blended these nearer things, yet left them palpable. But the day still flung its garlands of illumination over the broad skies; and the sensitive surfaces of the water with lavish sympathy repeated on its face the smiles of the blending zenith. And on either side of Leacraft stood Miss Tobit and Mr. Thomsen, and the month was June, and the year, narrated. Before we satisfy our curiosity more closely as to their relation, or note those changes which five years, however kindly inclined, must leave behind them, let us follow this conversation which of itself 1915, five years after all the happenings previously may unroll some curtains of the past.