In the meanwhile the climatic changes continued, and the face of the United Kingdom more and more altered under the infliction of the long and tempestuous winters, the cool, shortened summers, and the ice blockade about its coasts. For it had early become apparent that in some inexplicable way, the Arctic currents streamed down from the polar regions with reinforced volume and velocity, bringing with them the discharged masses of ice projected from their usual course westward, by the irruption into the Arctic Ocean through Behring Straits of the united oceanic rivers of the Gulf Stream and the currents from the Yellow Sea. Throughout the spring, the beleaguered coasts were deeply fringed with ice-floes and icebergs, whose chilling emanations created fogs, and wrapt the islands in cheerless cold. Each passing year had made more clear the surpassing wisdom of the evacuation. But a large population found that they could support themselves on the island, made up of the hardy, enduring types, the sailors, fishermen, and the boreal agriculturists--the farmer who entertains life successfully where the earth reluctantly yields her products, and the scant nature furnishes but few of the products of the soil. For now a most extraordinary thing happened. The refrigeration of Northern Europe had driven down towards the south the northern denizens. They eagerly seized the deserted land of the southerners, less accustomed to the niggardly responses of the field, and met the attacks of the climate with the accustomed patience and resistance to which they had become innured in their northern home. In this way the population of Iceland almost bodily left the bleak and ice-bound coasts of the Arctic island, that no longer offered the meagre semblance even of subsistence, which previously maintained its stubbornly hardy occupants. Nothing could have been more fortunate, as it retarded in some measure the shocking decline in the values of the land, and gave to all establishments that might otherwise have been turned into homes for owls and foxes a partial usefulness. Not indeed that the manufacturing interests would be considerably revived, but warehouses and buildings connected with manufacturing or shipping business would be made into storehouses, and the castles and large manor houses were converted into curious communal colonies, where those boreal people most joyfully repaired and developed profitable communities. Large numbers of the very poor found in the exodus of the well paid or employed classes above them, a grand chance to renew their own luck. They became keepers of the deserted buildings; they fraternized with the newcomers, and freed from the incubus of a superimposed social repression, became happy and industrious.