the last tenements of their abode, to slay a prosperous and proud people. Europe felt a sickening doubt as to the permanence of its life and works, and the autumn brought the shrewd and eager fingers of the cold into the streets and houses of Hamburg, Berlin, Cologne, Antwerp, Amsterdam, Ostend, Havre and even Paris. Attention to the vaticinations of science was mingled with the prophetic denunciations of religious frenzy. Pallor marked the features of the rulers of the people, and speechless stupor had seized the common people, who looked to the skies in pitiful confidence that their misery and desolation would touch the heart of that inscrutable Providence, who, reigning beyond the stars, held the reins of the winds and the bit of the frost in his multitudinous omniscience. But in England, and especially in Scotland, at the opening of the dreadful winter, the precipitation of snow had attained monstrous proportions. For four weeks the vault of the skies had been thick with falling clouds of snow. Leacraft left the window and descended the solitary halls, no longer swept by groups of tourists, to the street. A broken crease in the snow banks offered him a precarious access to Princes’ street. It appeared almost obliterated in places, at others it seemed a narrow slit between threatening walls of snow, that almost toppled over it, while blinding storms of fine particles, hissing over the undulous surface above, at times poured into the compressed chasm, filling it up many feet in a second of time. Abandoned cars, stalled one behind each other, for a block, both on Princes’ street and under the Castle, in the Lothian road, had become the refuge of the workers, and some were made into improvised hospitals and camps. A few relics, half-starved, and fainting with fatigue and exposure, were being treated with rough consideration in these accidental retreats, which, buried under snow, resembled caves, the feeble light of oil lamps and candles yielding a flickering illumination through the dull chill gloom within them.