The fright began in the north, in Scotland. News first arrived from the Hebrides, of desolating cold and overwhelming snow storms; then the story was picked up by the Shetlands and Aberdeen, and then the really tragic fate of Iceland was recounted. The cable between Scotland and Iceland, completed in 1906, brought the tale. And a freezing tale it was. Iceland had become a snow heap; its interior valleys were filled up, from Heckla to Skaldbreid; from Skaldbreid to Esja one portentous blanket of snow had levelled all inequalities of the surface. The terror stricken inhabitants deserted their farms and fought their way to Reykjavik, leaving all they possessed of sheep, cattle and horses to be destroyed by the pitiless tooth of the Ice King. Reykjavik had been deserted; its people fleeing to ships and steamers as the remorseless winds piled up the white shrouds of its Arctic burial. The cable summoned assistance for those yet fighting for life on the water’s edge, where the sea air helped them to maintain a margin of cleared ground. Over ten feet had accumulated, and ceaseless blizzards, unchecked, and even increasing in fury, with a tireless and killing cold, had renewed the ice age within that boreal republic. The panic spread. From confidence and scorn the people of Scotland and England and Ireland plunged into the clamor of despair and maniacal forebodings. Religious fraternities of “Frigidists” were organized, whose exegesis made the prophecy of the End of the World a menace of destruction by ice. Geikie’s _Ice Age_, and Croll’s _Climate and Time_ were read by earl and bellboy, and in the midst of the general consternation, the publishers of these books, in cheap form, doubled their business capacity and their fortunes.