The documentary archives of the city had been locked up in great safes and left for more propitious days--in summer? This example had been imitated in thousands of the better class houses, as the professional, the _official_ opinion, still hesitated to contemplate the monstrous alternative of a permanent sepulture of their beautiful home. One thing had been accomplished, and it was well done. The people, those who would leave, had been gotten away. When on the tenth of September the first storm of snow began, and the mercury sunk to a few degrees below zero Fah., the suffering became intense. Soon the railroads were blocked. Enlightened opinion had received its instructions. The return of Scotland to the bondage of snow and ice was published, and the publications carried conviction to a great many. The loss of the Gulf Stream was at length acknowledged. The impetus of the discovery made the worst prophecies credible. The intensity of this acquiescence was astounding. It became a matter of faith that the population should vacate their own city, and they obeyed instructions unanimously with a touching self-surrender to fate. Great numbers left Leith by boats and steamers summoned from London. The railroads responded with promptitude, though, by reason of a sudden access of energy in the government, nothing less would have been tolerated, longer than was necessary to confiscate their property and franchises. The phenomenal desertion of the city by three hundred thousand souls seemed as fore-ordained, as obligatory in the regime of events, as the setting of the sun, or the return of the seasons. But no activity of all the available means of transportation would have sufficed to take a population of more than three hundred thousand men and women in less than two months away from the city, unless it had been supplemented by other means. And a strange and most effective movement accomplished completely what more recondite or artificial methods would have failed to secure. The “Frigidists,” the group of fanatical preachers and their followers, who found in the present calamity an opportunity for a religious propaganda, or, through the fermentation and clouded expectations of their own zeal, believed it to be the expression of a supernatural agency, had begun a street crusade (always in Edinburgh popular and familiar) to accomplish the removal of the people. These singular fanatics served a most benevolent end, and their strange hallucinations wisely aided the anxious efforts of the authorities. They arrayed themselves in white, and went bareheaded through the streets of the city, exhorting all who would listen to accept their interpretations of the approaching judgment. They wove their texts of prophecy with denunciations of sin, and with the crowding evidences of some astounding climatic change, repeated with accelerated eagerness in paper, pulpit and forum, they acquired a tyrannous control over the emotions of the populace.