Alexander Leacraft was standing at a window in the upper story of the Caledonia Railroad station in Edinburgh, November 28th, 1909, and was gazing with fixed and tormented eyes upon an unusual scene. The sky beyond Carlton Hill was leaden grey with the blear dullness of a snow-laden atmosphere, and a singular and menacing bar of half-eclipsed red light, like a cooling bar of incandescent iron, shone with irregular palpitations through the descending sheets of snow. It was a strange and appalling picture. Already a week’s precipitation had filled up the deep moat of the Princes’ street gardens, choked up the tracks of the North British Railroad, mounded the ragged edges and wandering parapets of the Citadel, until its outlines were effaced in a colossal accumulation, like a titanic snowball, and a long incline of spotless snow sloped to St. Cuthbert’s Church, itself half buried in the powdery blanket. The blurred lineaments of Calton Hill, so familiar and so beloved by Scotchmen, were uncertainly descried, the Nelson monument, the unfinished peristyle, the mediaeval ranges of the penitentiary, the cheese box summit of the observatory (already the large group of buildings on the Pentland Hills had disappeared from sight), and the classic sombreness of the college fascade. Had Leacraft been near at hand, he would have seen that the monument to Scott--the tribute to one fame by the aspiring genius of another, dead before fame had quite enrolled him in her categories--was deeply buried, and that the inclined head of the Wizard was quickly vanishing under the piled up pillows of billowy snow. Alexander held a field-glass in his hand; the window at which he stood was open, and the snow blowing in upon it had raised a mound about his feet. The observer was, however, oblivious to this invasion; he leaned far out, and turned his inspection from point to point with rapid movements and obvious anxiety. A curious thing was happening immediately below him, and astonished him. In the leafless branches of the churchyard trees had gathered a vast concourse of crows, and the black-feathered congress was being momentarily augmented by new arrivals streaming in from all quarters, too evidently dislodged from more natural and habitual resorts. Their discordant cries seemed a melancholy symbol of doom. An awful silence otherwise possessed the Athens of the North. It was practically a deserted city, and its desertion was only part of a widespread calamity which now had begun the shocking chapter of national eviction. The usual hum and bustle of the streets had gone; the tramcars no longer trundled through its streets, and a half-hearted effort to make a path along the centre of Princes street accommodated a few distracted pedestrians and official retainers, yet unwilling to join the army of migration which had slowly moved away from a city, that the pitiless rigor of a new dispensation in climate had doomed to a wintry burial.