To all the brands and grades of the surviving or deserted inhabitants came increasing numbers of Scandinavians; important fractions of the Scotch settled on the coasts of England, and even immigrants from Newfoundland and Canada were tempted to seize the strange opportunity to occupy vast and abandoned cities, which furnished them in many instances with palatial shelters, but which later became repellant and unpleasant abodes, from which they too willingly withdrew to the smaller settlements. The tragedy of the big cities was complete. They were melancholy wastes, their empty streets seemed baleful and dismal. They gave ghostly thrills of terror, even in the noon-day, to the passers by--silent graves of past memories--the speechless, vacant, staring windows in the unlit rooms were like the open but expressionless eyes of corpses, and the awful fall of silence through the labyrinth of ways, roads, lanes, places, squares, alleys, descended upon the wanderer, caught by some malign trick of adventure within their voiceless, motionless depths, with the benumbing touch of the grave. He hastened his steps; he ran to escape the deadly stupor, the inexpressible gloom of loneliness, where every aspect betokened life. The solitude of nature inspires, draws to the lips an involuntary prayer, or places in the heart the movements of hope, but this hideous contradiction of signs and effect weighed like lead upon the spirit, and forced from the shrinking heart the ejaculations of despair. Never on earth was there such a picture of dejected grandeur, as this emptied metropolis of the world presented; never before had a great city become its own tomb, through the flight of its inhabitants; never in any record of disaster, whether by earthquake, pestilence, flood or vulcanism, was there such obliteration as followed the withdrawal of the citizens of London from their own capital. The thick blanket of the snow was thrown over it in winter, and its emergent domes, pinnacles, obelisks and needles offered a fantastic similitude to mortuary monuments, or else beneath the yellow moon its piercing whiteness, like a titanic face of someone killed, smote the blue black skies above it with remorse.