If 1880 opened cheerfully, it was solely because men felt a sense of relief at getting rid of what they called “the bad old year.” It had begun with bitter frosts, varied by black fogs. Its spring was a prolonged winter. Cold gloom marked its dog-days. There was no summer worth recording, and as for autumn, October and November saw the crops rotting in the fields. Farmers and squires, like Sheridan, were striving “to live on their debts.” Two great bank failures--that of the City of Glasgow Bank and that of the West of England Bank--had shaken the fabric of credit and reduced thousands of the well-to-do middle class to penury, while trade seemed going from bad to worse. Even science and invention appeared to be in a conspiracy to ruin people, for Edison’s contrivance of the electric lamp frightened investors in gas shares into a panic, which seriously depreciated the value of their property. Disasters in war, which are courteously called blunders, were followed by catastrophes by flood and field, which it is customary to call accidents. The ghastly tale of misfortunes was completed by the frightful hurricane that swept over the country on the last Sunday of the old year. At half-past seven of the evening of that day a furious gust swept down the Firth of Tay and cut a section out of the great railway bridge that spanned the estuary. A train crossing at the moment was blown, with the wreckage of the bridge and its precious freight of human life, into the surly waters of the Firth.[151] Very promptly did the Queen instruct Sir Henry Ponsonby to telegraph from Osborne a sympathetic message from her to the relatives of the dead.[152] Her Majesty had herself crossed the bridge on her way to Balmoral, and the shock of the disaster struck her to the heart.