Then came the sudden visitation of Edinburgh, with the scenes just recounted. The transference of these immense swarms of people, the evicted tenants of the north (poor creatures who had never owned the land they lived on except by the sufferance of some landlord duke or “gentleman,”) southward, was a task of difficulty. Sir John C--, was provost marshal of the city at the time (his father before him had held the same office), and had devised a scheme of goodly proportions and efficacy. He appointed wardens, who, with assistants selected by themselves, visited the families in the several bailiwicks in Edinburgh, and prepared them for the departure, and who also apportioned to the different wards of the town the streaming populations from all the neighboring villages, towns and the country sides. The railroads were seized by the government, and systematic transportation, begun and carried on night and day. They were taken to the larger seaports of England, and of course to London. Already secret misgivings that chilled the marrow of their bones, and made the blood circling in their hearts freeze with horror, were entertained by public men, that perchance this was not all, nor indeed the worst. Was the power of the Kingdom of Great Britain to be made the jest of the snowflake and the ice-cicle? The thought made reason totter, but new gleams of anticipation seemed suddenly to place upon that very thought the consecration of joy. They should be driven from their hearthstone to bring the English culture in other English lands, and emancipated men--men of the new type, like H. G. Wells--said that that culture, torn from the swaddling bands of a conventional tradition, the silly materialism of forms and dresses, of titles and classes, of imperialistic gew-gaws, and the impediments of habit, would expand into a modern civilization, which, carrying forward all the strains of strength, and imaginative and ideal aims, it had before, might incorporate in them the new procreative life of a liberal social state. Well! there was some consolation in that, but a consolation robbed of much positive consistency when all around them they saw the loss of trade, the paralysis of hope, the desertion of homes, and the rising threats of that inexorable and deaf deity--Nature.