“Yes, I do recall it, and, Mr. Leacraft, do you know,” replied Sir John, “that that day seems unmercifully far away. It seems as if you and I lived then in another world, and as if we perhaps had died, and were living in quite a different one now, and one very much worse, however bad the old one was. I am too dazed with all this. I feel as if I must wake up and find it all a horrible nightmare. But there can be no excuse for self-deception with me. I have studied this question. I am one of the most convinced that Scotland is doomed. Yes,” and the speaker straightened himself with a movement of exhaustion, “that England is doomed, too, that we are about to see primal conditions returning which are normal physiographic states, but which will destroy our civilization. Listen,” and as Leacraft sank into a chair near him, he leaned again upon the table and spoke with a sort of eager impatience at his own logic, as if he invited and expected and hoped for contradiction. “Listen. The isothermals as they existed before this calamity were a travesty on the map; they were an outrage upon meteorological symmetry. See here,” and Sir John drew out a portfolio which he opened on the table before him; he opened it and displayed a Mercator projection of the world. He was about to continue when a shout, which had mingled with it a throb of grief, like a loud wail, entered their ears--Leacraft noticed at the moment that the train was moving; it had been moving for some time. He looked out of the compartment window. “We are leaving Edinburgh,” his voice sank to a sympathetic whisper, as Sir C-- suddenly turned to gaze, too, along with all the rest, upon the shrouded city. The snow was falling from a leaden sky, and the mantled city, with its higher buildings, here a spire, there a monument, like an irregular mound hiding a burial, was indistinctly, very partially, seen. The men and one woman--the Scotch girl saved that afternoon from the tomb of snow--were standing in the coaches, leaning out of the open windows, to fathom the dull, mottling obscurity of the air, to catch--to be forever remembered--some recognized feature of the great, beautiful habitation now left in the on-coming night time, to be buried in the whirling wreaths. Hidden between its hills, imperishable but unseen, and waiting for its resurrection again into the joy of life and usefulness--a dead city, save for those brigands who, like wolves or ghouls, dared death to fatten on abandoned riches, amid its solemn, terrifying loneliness! Strange vicissitude! and as Leacraft descried, in a blurred exaggeration of its natural size, the dome of St. George’s Church, opposite the Albert Memorial, a voice somewhere among the tearful and dumb gazers repeated this verse from Burns’ invocation to the honored and historic site: