Then they quickly, and with excellent discernment, organized the people into small regiments, distributed to them white cockades and white rosettes and marched them out of the city, southward, over the frozen and snow-lined roads. This evacuation began scarcely soon enough for the best results. But it gave relief. These moving companies, accompanied with vans and horse carts, and vehicles of every description, gathering numbers along their way, grew in picturesque confusion, as flocks of sheep and herds of cattle were united to them, or the miners from the coal pits, and the artisans from the factories joined in the vast, singing army. Like the inexorable morality of the French mobs in the French Revolution, who scornfully resisted the temptations of their own hunger in a fierce zeal to protect private property, so an overmastering enthusiasm permeated those rough Scottish nomads, and they marched through the country rigorously just and honest. There was suffering and death among them, and nothing could have been more sublimely pathetic than the improvised services of burial that were held from time to time along the roads they crossed. Those who heard its vibrant and powerful melody will remember the eclipsing magnificence of the hymn, sung to the air of _Adestes Fideles_, which began with the words: “Firm, faithful and tried, With endless glory crowned.” The success of these “Frigidists” was phenomenal, but it also clearly arose from the awful portents of change which made the stoutest men quail, and not inaptly tested the scepticism of the boldest scoffers. The revolution in Nature had not only affected Scotland; its dire effects were felt in the whole of the Scandinavian area, and the more southern parts of Europe, which had owed some measure of their favorable winters to the direct or intermediate influence of the Gulf Stream, were now made to feel their sudden penury in its removal. A frightful stagnation invaded the European markets; a panic of doubt spread confusion everywhere, and those who controlled the sources of money, very soon checked its use in the avenues of trade, while of necessity speculation and the desire for speculation simultaneously vanished.