Alexander Leacraft himself awaited reluctantly the departure of a train of emergency which was expected to carry away the last remnants of Edinburgh’s population. He had come to the unfortunate city freighted with misgivings, when the news reached London--itself experiencing peculiar vicissitudes--of the terrifying severity and earliness of the winter in Scotland. He recalled his forebodings, which the President’s speech had awakened, though the later reports of the complete reversal of the Gulf Stream into the Pacific, and the accomplished destruction of the Central American Neck of land had already stirred the scientific minds of England to the utterance of half-hearted warnings. The matter had now suddenly loomed up into a frightful reality, and the devastating storms sweeping out of the black heart of the north, had brought Scotland, the Faroe Islands and Iceland into a common fate of extinction. The sheltering power of the Gulf Stream was removed from Great Britain, and the frost of the Arctic world, so long repulsed, but now no longer compressed within the Arctic circle, expanded with instantaneous certainty, spreading the shroud of its killing cold over the same latitudes in Europe that for ages had slept beneath its spell in America. The population in part of the north of Scotland had escaped by means of ships to other countries or to southern England. Many villages, isolated houses, and remote districts had suffered cruel hardships, and the entombed bodies of thousands of families waited for a recovery which perhaps only in ages “yet unborn” could come to them. The white burden of snow mantled the valleys and hillsides of Scotland, the higher hills of the Trossachs, and the Grampians, the defiant crest of Goat Fells in Arran, and the twin peaks of the Island of the Holy Mount. Enormous drifts had risen in white waves almost to the summit of Bruce’s monument at Sterling, and the old Abbey of Cambuskenneth had disappeared. Ice of great thickness prevailed in the Clyde, and the movement of the tides had forced it up in threatening hummocks upon the drab stone cottages and villas of Greenock and Gourock. From Aberdeen to Leith the cities had been slowly deserted, after desperate efforts to free them from their entombment. The trains going south to England were loaded with the rich contents of mansions and summer castles; agonizing scenes had been witnessed at a thousand points where the heart-broken people sadly turned their backs upon all they had, and all they loved and knew. Heroic rescues were as numerous as the occasions demanding courage and inflexible daring had been frequent. Throughout Great Britain the trembling soul of the nation shrunk upon itself with a nameless dread, as it suddenly found its existence confronted with the inexorable processes of nature, when the appalling and relentless squadrons of the Ice King, with vengeful speed, issued in all the fierce panoply of wind and hideous life-killing cold, from