The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Evacuation of England, by L. P. (Louis Pope) Gratacap

THE EVACUATION OF ENGLAND

Alexander Leacraft was regarding with as much interest as his constitutional lassitude permitted, the progress of a distinctly audible altercation on Pennsylvania avenue, Washington, D. C. The disputants had not felt it necessary, under the relaxing influences of a premature spring, to interpose any screen of secrecy, such as a less exposed position, or subdued voices, between themselves and the news-mongering (and hungering, let it be added) proletariat of our nation’s capital.

A small crowd, composed of the singular human compound always pervasive and never to be avoided in Washington, which, in that centre of political sensations, is made up of street loafers, accidental tourists, perambulating babies, “niggers,” and presumptive statesmen, enclosed this “argument”; and from his elevated station, within the front parlor6 of the McKinley, Mr. Leacraft was afforded a very excellent view of and an equally distinct hearing of the disagreement and its principals.

The two disputants were themselves sufficiently contrasted in appearance to have allured the casual passer-by to observe their contrasted methods in debate. One—the taller—was a thin, angular man with unnaturally long arms, a peculiar swaying habit of body, an elongated visage, terminating in a short, stubby growth of whiskers, and a sharp, crackling kind of voice, with unmistakable nasal faults. He seemed to be a southern man modified by a few imitations of the northern type.

He was addressing a bulky, rather disdainful man in a checquered suit of clothes, who had advanced the season’s fashion by assuming a straw hat, and whose rosy face, broad and typical features, and yet not plethoric expansion of body, strong and stalwart frame betokened much animal force, and reserved power of action. He might have been a northern man. As Alexander Leacraft looked at them, it was the southern man who was speaking, and his uplifted arm, at regular intervals, rose and fell, as the palms of both hands met in a cadence of corroborative whacks. It may interest the reader to know that the particular time of this particular incident was April, 1909.

“Let me tell you this, Mr. Tompkins,” drawled the southerner with loquacious ease, the crackle and7 sharpness of his intonation appearing as his excitement increased, “the necessities of our states demand the Canal at whatever cost. It will be the avenue for an export trade to the east, which will convert our stored powers of production into gold, and it will react upon the whole country north and south in a way that will make all previous prosperity look like nothing. Our cotton mills have grown, our mineral resources have been developed; Georgia and Alabama are to-day competing with your shaft furnaces and steel mills for the trade of the railroads, and builders; and for that matter we are building ourselves. We can support a population ten times all we have to-day; our resources have been just broached, but exhaustion is a thousand years away. Our rival has been Cuba. She has robbed us of trade; she has put our sugar plantations out of business; even her iron, which I will admit is superior in quality, has scaled our profits on raw ingots, but she can’t hold us down on cotton. Open up this canal, and we will gather the riches of the Orient; our ships will fill it with unbroken processions, and in the train of that commerce in cotton, every section of the Union will furnish its contribution to swell the argosies of trade. I tell you sir” and the excited speaker, conscious of an admiring sympathy in the crowd around him, raised his voice into a musical shout, in which the crackle was quite lost, “the commerce,8 the mercantile integrity of these United States will be restored, and American bottoms for American goods will be no longer a vain aspiration; it will be a realized dream, an actual fact.”

He paused, as if the projectile force of his words had deprived him of breath, and then at the momentary opportunity Mr. Tompkins, in a clear and metallic voice, with a punctuative force of occasional hesitation, undertook his friend’s refutation.

“I’m not contesting the fact, Mr. Snowden,” he said, “that the opening of the Canal means a good deal to your portion of the country. Does it mean as much to the rest of the country, and does it mean so much to you for a long time. You mention cotton. Do you know that the cotton cultivation of India and Egypt has increased enormously, and that it is grown with cheaper labor than you can command. You have made the negro acquainted with his value. You have raised his expectations, you have thrust him into a hundred avenues of occupation and every one of his new avocations adds a shilling a day to the worth per man of the remainder, who stick to field work and cultivate your cotton fields. The cotton of Egypt and the cotton of India, I mean its manufactured forms, will go through that canal to Asia and Japan and Polynesia just as surely as yours will, and it’ll go cheaper. It is poorer cotton, I know, but that will9 not effect the result.

“That isn’t all. Brazil and the Argentine Republic are growing cotton, and they are doing well at it. Europe will take the raw stuff from them and keep up her present predominance in that market while she turns their cotton bolls into satinettes and ginghams for the almond-eyes of Asia. The canal, breaking down a barrier of separation between the two oceans, turns loose into the Pacific the whole frenzied, greedy and capable cohorts of European manufacture. It will make a common highway for Europe, and our unbuilt clippers and tramp steamers will stay unbuilt, or unused, to rot on their ways in the shipyards. The west coast will be sidetracked, and our trunk railroads will cut down their schedules and their dividends at the same time. Roosevelt put this canal through, and your southern votes helped to elect him against his protest, but brought to it by an overwhelming public sentiment that applauded his power to chain or sterilize trusts; and he promised last March to your southern rooters, at his inauguration, to see that before his present new term was over, before 1913, the canal would be opened, and perhaps he’ll make good.

“You southerners elected Roosevelt, and you have killed the Democratic party. The new powers of growth of that party were most likely to develop among you, but you shoved aside the proffered offer10 of political supremacy, because you too had surrendered to the idols of Mammon, and were willing to sell your birth-right for a mess of pottage. Well! You’ve got the canal and you’ve got Roosevelt, and let me tell you Mr. Snowden,” and the restrained, almost nonchalant demeanor of Mr. Tompkins became suddenly charged with electric earnestness, “you’ll get Hell, too.”

This admonitory expletive, uttered with a force that seemed to impart to it a physical objectivity, caused the increasing circle of auditors to retreat sensibly, and, without more consideration, giving a glance of mute scorn at the flushed face of the southerner, the speaker pressed his way through the little crowd, which, after a moment’s suspension of judgment, seemed reluctant to let him escape, and disappeared.

His opponent was distinctly chagrined. The wrinkled lines about his peculiarly pleasant eyes, indicated his strained attention, and were not altogether unrelated to a sudden muscular movement in his clenched hands. His hopes, however, for some sort of forensic gratification might have been sensibly raised as he discovered himself the sole occupant of the small vacant spot on the side walk, walled in by a human investiture, the first line of which was made up of two pickaninnies, three newsboys, one rueful cur and some impromptu mothers who had taken the family babies out for11 air and recreation, but, overcome by the indigenous love of debate, had forgotten their mission, and held their charges in various attitudes of somnolence or furtive rebellion against the hedge of men behind them.

It was evidently expected that the southern gentleman would relieve his feelings, and it was also evident from a few ejaculations hap-hazardly emitted from the concourse, that the majority of those present was in his favor.

Mr. Snowden looked around him reflectively, and a sense of personal dignity forced its way against the almost over-powering impulse to appeal to popular approval, and convinced him that the place and the audience were inopportune for any further discussion. He could not, however, escape the demonstrated force of popular expectancy, and, with a consenting smile, a shrug of his shoulders, and with his hat raised above his head, swinging gently, he called out “Three cheers for Teddy and the Canal.”

In an instant the group seized the invitation, and under the cover, if it may be so violently symbolized, of the cloud of vocality, his enthusiasm evoked, Mr. Snowden, like the fortuitous and directive deities of the epics, vanished.

There remained an unsatisfied group to which more accessions were quickly made, the whole movement evidently animated by some emotion12 then predominant in the national capital. This group broke up into little knots of talkers, and as the day was closing, no urgency of business engagements and no immediate insistency of domestic duties interfered with the easily elicited Washingtonian tendency to settle, on the public curb, the vexed questions of state, if not to enlighten Providence on the more abstruse functions of His authority.

Alexander Leacraft willingly surrendered himself to the study of this representative public Althing, and felt his exasperating torpor so much overcome by a new curiosity as to make him not averse to stepping out into the hall of the hotel, descending the steps into the street, and engaging himself in the capacity of a rotational listener at the various groups, sometimes not exceeding two men, who had become vocally animated, and felt themselves called upon to supply the deficiency of objurgation, so disagreeably emphasized by the sudden departure of the northern and southern disputants.

The illuminative results of his ambulatory inspection, and his own expostulations or inquiry, may be thus succinctly summarized.

Mr. Theodore Roosevelt, elected in his own behalf in 1905, as president of the United States, after having served out the unexpired term of William McKinley, who was assassinated in November,13 1901, and with whom he had been elected as vice president, had been again re-elected in the fall of 1908, against his emphatic rejection, at first, of a joint nomination of the Republican and Democratic parties. The campaign, if campaign it could be called, had been one of the most extraordinary ever recorded, and in its features of popular clamor, the grotesque conflict of the personal repugnance of an unwilling candidate nominated against his will, and in defiance of his own repeated inhibitions to nominate him at all, because of his solemn promise that he would defer to the unwritten law of the country, and not serve a third term, was altogether unprecedented, and to some observers ominous. He was reminded that his first term, although practically four years, was still only an accident, that there was no subversion of the unwritten law, in his serving again, as his actual election as president had occurred but once, that his popularity among the people was of such an intense, almost self-devouring ardor, that it was an act of suicidal negation, of unpatriotic desertion to shun or reject the people’s obvious need, that a war, yet unfinished, had been begun by him against corporate interests, that its logical continuance devolved upon him, that the unique occasion of a unanimous nomination to the presidency carried with it a sublime primacy of interest, that cancelled all previous conditions, promises or wishes14 on his part, and laid an imperious command upon its subject that deprived him of volition, and absolutely dissolved into nothingness any apparent contradiction of his words and acts. Finally, it was insisted that the Panama Canal was nearing completion, that its remarkable advance was due to Mr. Roosevelt that this fact had been prepotent in shaping the councils of southern Democrats in proposing the, otherwise unwarranted, endorsement of a Republican nomination, that a strong minority sentiment had crystallized around an angry group of capitalists who were only too anxious to get rid of Roosevelt altogether, and that in the case of his refusal, these men would so manipulate the newspapers, and inflame public apprehension, against some possible outbreak of social radicalism, financial heresy, and anarchistic violence, that a reaction begun would become unmanageable, and some tool of the reactionaries, and the railroads, would be swept into office, and with him a servile Congress, and Roosevelt’s work, so aggressively and successfully prosecuted, would be all sacrificed. Nor was this all. The return to a divided nomination, with an unmistakable intention on the part of the conservatists to repeal all disadvantageous legislation to the monopolies, corporations and trusts, would at once precipitate a conflict of classes.

A radical man, possibly a demagogue, would be15 placed in opposition to the choice of the plutocracy. His election was also not improbable. The powers of socialism, enormously strengthened by the adhesion of an educated class, might be triumphant, and the succeeding steps in social revolution would bring chaos.

This dilemma was so pertinaciously displayed, so forcibly accentuated, that Roosevelt had yielded at the last moment, not insensibly affected (as what spirited man would not be) by the magnificent assemblies (mass meetings) throughout the country, tumultuously vociferating the call of the people.

The southern people, with characteristic warmth, and through the suddenly consummated attachment of Senator Tillman to Roosevelt, and under the coercion of Senator Bailey’s logic and power of argumentative persuasion, had swelled the tide of popular approval. Roosevelt became an idol—his election was almost unanimous, a handful only of contestants having gathered in a kind of moral protest around Governor Hughes as a rival candidate. Governor Hughes’ nomination was achieved through a combination of opposite political interests, as anomalous as that which chose Roosevelt, and having precisely the same quality of coherence.

It represented dissatisfied Republicans, an alienable remnant of Democrats, and had drawn into it a few sporadic political elements that barely16 sufficed to give it numerical significance. W. J. Bryan, who would have been otherwise a candidate himself, had endorsed Roosevelt, furnishing thereby an example of political abnegation which had enormously increased his popularity, and assured him the nomination of Nationalists, as the new fusionists were called, in 1913. This was also deemed a wise forethought, as a provision against the possible success of the rampant Hearstites. Hearst would have been the socialist candidate in the last campaign, had not the principal himself, on hearing of Roosevelt’s nomination, sapiently withdrawn, fearing defeat, which would have too seriously discredited him in the next national struggle.

The Prohibitionists had, by an act of virtual self-repudiation, thrown their not inconsiderable vote to Roosevelt. The Socialists were the only important opponents of his election, and their surprising record made the prophetic warnings, which had convinced Roosevelt of the necessity of his candidacy, appear like a veritable intervention of Providence, at least this was the language commonly used with reference to it.

Roosevelt had displayed remarkable self-control and consistent gravity, and had even, in a very extraordinary address at his inauguration, deprecated the unanimity of his election. He deplored the precarious dilemma of a country which found itself forced to do violence to its traditions in order17 to escape an imagined danger.

Almost synchronous with his re-election, the announcement had been made that the Panama Canal, upon which the President in his former term, had exerted the utmost pressure of his inexhaustible enthusiasm, energy and exhortation, was advancing very rapidly, engineering difficulties unexpectedly had vanished, a system of extreme precision in the control of the work, itself largely the device of the President, had facilitated the entire operation, and a promise of still more rapid progress was made.

This promise had produced a storm of southern enthusiasm. The south, completely restored in its financial autonomy, had been growing richer and richer, and their public men had not hesitated to paint, in the brightest colors, the further expansion of their prosperity with the opening of this avenue of commerce between the oceans, assuring its people the markets of Asia, and their rapid promotion to the political, social and financial primacy in the United States.

Northern capitalists had not been incredulous to these predictions, and in a group of railroad magnates, whose interests seemed now seriously threatened, a sullen resentment was maintained against Roosevelt, in which the unmistakable notes of designs almost criminal had been detected. Mr. Tompkins, whose altercation with the southerner had led Leacraft into this voyage of interpellation18 and discovery, was a paid agent, in the employ of this cabal.

Alexander Leacraft was an Englishman, inheriting an English temperament without English prejudices; he was fortunately free from the worst faults of that insular hesitancy which imparts the curious impression of timidity, and had advanced far enough in cosmopolitan observation to get rid of the queerness of provincial ignorance. He was indeed a sane and attractive man, and provided by nature with a forcible physique, a good face, and a really fascinating proclivity to make the best of things, admire his companions, and bend unremittingly to the pressure of his environment.

He had not escaped the dangers incident to youth, and his heart had become attached to a lady of Baltimore—one of the undeviatingly arch and winning American girls—to whom he had been introduced by her brother, a commercial correspondent.

The nature of his affairs—he was the secretary of an English company which operated some copper mines in Arizona and Canada—had made him a frequent visitor to the shores of the New World, and he had not been unwilling to express his hope that the United States would become his final home. These sentiments were quite honest, though it might have elicited the cynical observation that the capture of his affections by Miss Garrett had19 done more to weaken his loyalty to the crown than any dispassionate admiration of a Republican form of government. But the imputation would have been malicious. Leacraft did feel an earnest admiration for the American people, and yielded a genial acquiescence to the claims of popular suffrage. His connexion with America had been fortunate, and he had come in contact with men and women whose natures by endowment, and whose manners and habits, conversation and tastes, by inheritance and cultivation, were elevating and engaging—men and women whose nobility of sympathy with all things human was reflected in an art of living not only always decorous and refined, but guided, too, by the principles of urbanity and justice.

The Garretts of Baltimore were a widely connected, and in numbers an imposing social element, and none of the various daughters of light and loveliness who bore that name more merited consideration in the eyes of manly youth than the capricious, captivating and elusive Sally. Her graces of manner were not less delightful than her conversation was spirited and roguish, and her assumption of a demure simplicity had often driven Alexander Leacraft to the limits of his English matter-of-fact credulity in explaining to her the relations of the King to Parliament, or the municipal acreage of the old City of London. All of which information20 this very well read and much travelled young woman, as might be expected, was possessed of, but just for the purposes of her feminine and cruel fancy, not too well disposed towards her patient suitor, disingenuously concealed. Sally really enjoyed the painstaking gravity with which the young Englishman explained the eternal principles of English rule, and the never-to-be-forgotten superiorities of London.

Mr. Leacraft had met Sally under circumstances the most provocative of admiration. In her own home; where the sincerity of hospitality and the urgency of an American’s deference to the best instincts of courtesy, did not altogether mitigate her coquetry and mirthful affectations, and even, by the faintest gloss of repression, made them the more delicious. The Englishman was bewitched, and his infatuation declared itself so plainly that Sally—whose heart was quite untouched by his distress—tried the resources of her ingenuity to avoid meeting him alone.

Leacraft, on the morrow of the day, whose close had so deeply inducted him into a study of American politics, expected to make a deferred visit to the Garretts at Baltimore, and he had quite firmly resolved that he would reveal his desperate extremity to Sally, and plead his best to show her how empty life would be to him without her, and that it would be shockingly obdurate in her to decline to21 regard him as the goal of her marital ambitions.

He felt some fear of her revolting gayety, and his fears were not assuaged by the remembrance of any particular occasion when her conduct towards him permitted him to indulge in hopes. Still the thing must be done. His unrest must be quieted. To know the worst was better than this feverish anxiety of doubt. And besides, with a prudence not altogether British, he thought he could endure repulse better now than later, and in the event of that evil alternative, he could cast about him for alleviating resources which might be more easily found now, than if he waited longer, and if he continued to expose himself to the perilous encounter of her eyes, and the tantalizing caresses of her wit.

When Leacraft returned to the hotel, he found a letter waiting for him, which he saw at once was from his friend, Ned Garrett. He tore it open and discovered, to his considerable discomfiture, that it postponed the event of his momentous proposal.

It read:

Dear Leacraft:

Aunt Sophia is very sick at Litchfield, Conn. Mother and Sally have gone on. Can you put off your visit until May, say the 28th? You will find it dull here without Sally and Mother. I shall go with them as far as New York. We all intend, if Aunt Sophy concludes to remain in this bright world a little longer, and the Dr. endorses her22 good intentions, to visit Gettysburg on Memorial Day (Decoration old style). The President will deliver a memorial oration. Come with us and see the great battlefield, which is a wonderful monument to the nation’s dead, a beautiful picture itself, and probably you will see and hear things worth remembering besides. Write to the house, and I will get your letter when I return in two weeks. But do come.

Yours sincerely,
Edward T. Garrett.

Leacraft put down the letter slowly. He was disappointed. A summons to the west, to the mines in Arizona, had reached him just the day before, and he must get out there before a week was over. He had thought to have finished this affair first, and to find in the tiresome trip distraction, if Sally was unfavorable to his appeal, or unexpected interest if he succeeded in winning her assent. Still he could readily accept the invitation. He would be back in May, and, perhaps after all the occasion might be more favorable. Sally softened into a little sympathetic humor by her visit to her sick aunt, and he strengthened by the encouraging reflexion of having successfully dissipated the little cloud of misunderstanding, or worse, at the mines, might produce conditions psychologically adequate to bring about his victory.

He stepped to the window. The view from it23 was always pleasing, at this moment in the descending shades of the closing day and with the vanishing lights hurrying westward beyond the Potomac, it possessed an ineffable loveliness. The great white spectre of the Washington monument, immaterialized and faintly roseate against the softly flaming skies, and brooding genius-like above the trees of the Reservation was always there, and that night it assumed the strangely deceptive but fascinating vagary of an exhalation, as if built up from the emanations of the earth, and the vapors of the air, remaining immobile in the still ether as a portent or a promise. The man’s face grew clouded as the fairy obelisk faded, and with the enveloping darkness became again discernible as a dull and stony pile.

That evening Leacraft felt particularly restless and detached. He felt the need of entertainment, and of entertainment of a sort that would fix his faculty of thought, awaken speculation, and immerse him in reasonings and the intricacies of argument. The few theatrical bills presented no attractions more weighty than a clever comedian in a musical farce, a sensational melodrama (“much better,” said Leacraft), and vaudeville. Music was shunned; there was nothing quite serious offered, and then music has so many painful influences on the apprehensive mind, and is turned to such cruel uses in the economy of nature, for24 making uneasy lovers more agitated. No! he didn’t wish music. Baffled for an instant, he concluded to walk. Muscular exercise, mere translation on one’s legs, is a marvellous remedy for the diabolical blues, and then it can never be told what the Unseen holds for you, if you only go out to meet It in the streets, and amongst other people, hunting, perhaps, like yourself, diversion from their own inscrutable megrims. It—the Unseen—may quite divertingly mix you up in a comedy or a tragedy, or consolingly give you a glimpse of other human miseries immeasurably greater than your own.

So walk it was. He had hardly covered two blocks towards the White House, when he met Dr. M—, the most amiable and accomplished editor of the National Museum, and one of those multi-facetted gentlemen who respond to every scientific thrill around them, and hold in the myriad piled up cells of their cerebral cortex the knowledge, selected, labelled and accessible, of the world. Leacraft knew the Doctor; had indeed consulted him upon a chemical reaction, in the elimination of cadmium from zinc. The Doctor, with genial fervor, grasped his hand, persuasively put his own disengaged hand on Leacraft’s back, and dexterously turned him around with the observation: “You are going the wrong way. Binn reads a paper to-night before the Geographical Society, over at the Museum, on a live subject. It’s about earthquakes25 and the Panama Canal. The matter has a good deal of present interest. The President may be there. It’s worth your while. Come along.”

Leacraft jumped with pleasure, if an Englishman may be said ever to respond so animatedly to a welcome alternative. This met his requirements exactly. He would, in these surroundings and under the stimulation of an intellectual effort, in listening to a lecture which he hoped might possess literary merit as well, quite forget his immediate solicitudes.

“It is curious,” resumed Dr. M—, as they directed their steps towards the umbrageous solitudes of the Reservation, “how inevitably many practical questions demand an answer at the hand of geology or physiography, which are however never consulted, and disaster follows. In the spring of 1906 a destructive outbreak of Vesuvius occurred, and much of the ensuing loss of life might have been prevented by reliance upon scientific warnings. Indeed, the loss of life on this last occasion of the volcano’s activity was greatly reduced through the premonitions of its approach by delicate instruments. For that matter, from the beginning, the vulcanologist, at least as soon as such a being was a more or less completed phenomenon in our scientific life, would have pointed out the considerable risk of living on the flanks of that querulous protuberance. But it can hardly be expected,26 I suppose, that large populations can effect a change in habitation as long as the dangers that threaten them occur at long intervals, and the human fatality of unreasoning trust in luck remains unchanged. Take for instance the case of the village of Torre del Greco, four and a half miles from the foot of Vesuvius. It has been overwhelmed seventeen times, but the inhabitants, the survivors, return after each extinction to renew their futile invocations for another chance.”

“I suppose,” queried Leacraft, “that we are to be informed to-night whether the Canal from the scientific point of view is a safe investment?”

“Perhaps,” doubtfully returned the doctor. “You see, it’s this way. In the spring of the year that saw the outpouring of lava that invaded the villages of southern Italy, San Francisco suffered from a serious earthquake that ruptured the public structures of the city, dislocated miles of railroad tracks, ruined the beautiful Stanford University, shook out the fronts of buildings, and precipitated a fire that all but wiped out the Queen City of the Pacific coast. It has been feared that some such seismic terror might demolish the superb structures of the canal, and we are to learn to-night whether these earth movements threaten the new waterway at the isthmus.”

“I have reason to believe,” rejoined Leacraft, “that this canal has been itself a source of political27 disturbance, and that it is likely to effect convulsions in your body politic as dangerous in a social way as those which brought about the financial and physical upset at San Francisco.”

“Don’t worry on that score,” replied his companion. “I can tell you that the political texture of this country is not to be worn to a frazzle by any collision of interests. Such things adjust themselves, and the way out only means a new entrance to brighter prospects and bigger undertakings. Yes, I guess someone will be hurt, but individuals don’t count if the whole people are benefited.”

“Still,” remonstrated Leacraft, “the people is made up of individuals, and it’s simply a fact that you can’t disturb the equilibrium of one part of society without jostling the rest.”

“In a way, yes,” slowly answered the doctor. “But it is quite clear to my mind that the enormous advantages of the canal will hide from sight the losses that may be inflicted on the railroads, in the dislocation of rates, and even that will be temporary, as the new business raises our population, and their passenger traffic touches higher and higher averages.”

“The canal has been an expensive enterprise,” suggested Leacraft. “It would be a great misfortune if it brought any kind of material reverses.”

28

“Rubbish,” retorted the doctor; “this prating is the madness or the envy of croakers and cranks. Do you think that a connexion between the oceans that will shorten the route from one to the other by nearly 6,000 miles, and bring our eastern seaboard, with all its tremendous agencies of production within reach of a continent that is slowly becoming itself occidentalized, and demanding every day the equipment of the west, is a mercantile delusion? We are all gainers. It is a scheme of mutualization on a world-wide scale, but America distributes the profits and holds the surplus.”

The two friends by this time had reached the entrance of the Museum, and passing through its symbolic portals, turned to the left, and found themselves in a dull room, portentously charged with an exhaustive exhibit of the commerce of all nations. Here, on tables and shelves, was displayed a wonderful assortment of primitive and modern ships, primeval dugouts, Philippine catamarans, Mediterranean pirogues, sloops, schooners, brigs, brigantines, barques, barkentines, luggers, lighters, caravals, Dutch monstrosities, models of those extraordinary ships which Motley has described as “built up like a tower, both at stem and stern, and presenting in their broad, bulbous prows their width of beam in proportion to their length, their depression amidships, and in other sins against symmetry, as much opposition to progress29 over the waves as could well be imagined,” the Latin trireme and the Greek trireme, the ironclads of France used in 1855, the monitors of the Civil War, the recent wonders in battleships, torpedo boats, and destroyers, with naphtha launches, submarine wonders, the old time American cutters, and models of the stately packets that once made the trip from New York to Portsmouth in fourteen days, with a various and diversified exhibit of yachts and pleasure boats, all burnished, japanned and varnished, and now dimly lustrous in the futile illumination of the room. Above them on the walls was a prolix illustration of the hydrography of the world; charts of currents, pelagic streams, areas of calms, submarine basins, maps of rainfalls, prevalent winds, storm regions, precipitation, barometric maxima and minima, and then still higher up on the walls, that dispensed knowledge over each square inch of their dusty and dusky surfaces, Leacraft descried the tabulations of tonnage of the merchant marine of the nations of the earth, with fabulous figures of imports and exports, and the staple products of this prolific and motherly old earth, caressed into fructification by the tireless arms of her scrambling broods of children.

Leacraft was soon deserted by the doctor, who found occasion to wander among the slowly arriving scientific gentry and politely inquire after the30 health of the particular scientific offspring, whose tottering footsteps each one was engaged in nurturing into a more reliant attitude before the world. Leacraft found the dim room, with its preoccupied occupants vacantly settling into the seats around him, and its motley array of picturesque models strangely congenial. It soothed, by the abrupt strangeness of its contents, the subdued intellectual placidity of the audience, and by its mere physical retirement from the outer bustle of the streets, and the iterative commonplaces of the hotel corridor. The exact process of subduction would have been hard keenly to analyze, but Leacraft seemed to forget his personal disquietude, and develop into a congenital oneness with these earnest men and women around him, eager to know, and not too patient towards sophistry or pretension. He hardly cared to know who was who. It made no matter. They all seemed freed from the petty vanities of living, and now engrossed in the triumphant tasks of thought; and he felt himself elevated into a kind of mental abstraction which eagerly carried on its functions in an atmosphere of ideas.

And yet how was it, that just above the little desk which was to receive the honorable burden of the lecturer’s manuscript, he suddenly distinctly saw the fair face, with its light blue eyes, its delicate blush of color, and the slightly mocking pout of the lips of Sally, the beloved. Leacraft almost31 rose upright in his astonishment at the impossible hallucination. He was leaning forward, half incredulous of the report of his own senses, and half subjected by a delicious whim that the apparition was an augury of success, when a commotion spreading on all sides of him roused his attention, and the vision fled. He would have willingly had it stay. People were rising in his vicinity, and soon the assembly was on its feet. Some one had entered who was the cause of this unusual excitement. “The President” came to his ears, murmured by a dozen persons near him, and he had hardly sprung to his own feet when, with many salutations, a strongly formed, rather bulky man, with a manner of almost nervous scrutiny passed by him moving down the aisle to the front. It was indeed President Roosevelt, and Leacraft, now startled into the most active interest, slipped forward a seat or two, to gain a position which might afford him a better view of this remarkable person. The audience remained standing until the President, escorted by a tall red-whiskered gentleman, whom Doctor M—, who had just turned up in search of his friend, whispered was Dr. George O. Smith, the distinguished Director of the Survey, had reached a seat reserved for him at the front of the hall.

Leacraft now observed more closely the character of the convocation, and realized its composite and representative elements. Dr. M—, always himself32 immersed in the study of the lives, achievements and distinctions of the prominent men of the country, was an enthusiastic verbal cicerone through the maze of faces which seemed suddenly to have condensed into a really crowded audience. Here was Dr. D—, the Alaskan explorer in the early days of the nineteenth century, the world recognized authority on the tertiary fossils of the east and west coasts, and a man of erudition and delightful literary skill. Beyond him sat Dr. M—, a quiet-faced man, curator of the National Museum, author of text books, and gifted with a singularly shrewd thoughtfulness. At his side sat the sphinx-featured F—, of Chicago, a gentle-minded scholar, to whom the Heavens had entrusted the secrets of their meteoritic denizens, and who, by a more fortunate circumstance, held a pen of consummate grace. Again at his side was the Jupiter-browed Ward, an erratic over the face of the globe, possessed with a transcendant enthusiasm for the same celestial visitors that F— described, and chasing them with the zeal of a lynx in their most inaccessible quarries; a man of immense conviviality, and controlling the smouldering fires of a temper that defied reason or resistance. At the front of the rows of chairs, and not far from the cynosure of all eyes—the President—were two notable students of the past life of the globe, Professors O— and S—, men whose studies in that amazing storehouse of extinct33 life which the West held sealed in its clays and marls, limestones and sandstones, had continued on higher and more certain levels the work of Marsh and Leidy and Cope, and who had transcribed before the whole world, in monuments of scientific precision, the most startling confessions of the fossil dead. To one side, on the same row, sat Prof. B—, known in two continents, for chemical learning, especially on that side of chemistry which mingles insensibly with the laws of matter. And whispering in his ear, with sundry emphatic nods, sat, next to him, Dr. R—, of Washington, learned in the ways of men’s digestion, and the enigmas of food and the arts of food-makers. In the row behind, the expressive head of Young, aureoled with years and honors, was seen, and at his side the face of Newcomb, who had set the seal of his genius and industry across the patterned stars. Here was A— H—, the geologist, reticent and receptive, there C—, weighted with new responsibilities in furnishing time to the rapacious biologist, and in discovering new ways of making this old world. Behind them sat M—, wise beyond belief in bric-a-brac and brachiopods, vindictively assertive, and self-sacrificingly tender and kind. There was McG— and I—, W—, A—, V—, and B— W—, bringing to the speaker the homage of archæology, of petrology, of zoology, and morphology. In a group of motionless and eager attention were A—,34 the sage metereologist, beloved in two continents; B—, abstruse and difficult, meditative, as a man might be who kept his hand on the pulses of matter, and B—, skillful in weighing the atoms of the air, or probing the volcanoes of the moon. In one line, mingling in conversation that reached Leacraft’s ears as a strange jargon of conflicting sciences, were G—, H— and H—k. And beyond them, mute, as if by mutual repulsion, sat F—, the agile scrutinizer of Nature’s crystals; P—, holding in his labyrinthine memory the names of half a universe of shells, and B—n, to whom each plant of the wayside bowed in recognition of a master’s knowledge of itself. Against the wall, in a triad of sympathy, was A—, the surgeon; S—, the neurologist, and R—. And alone, in an isolation that belied his intense geniality, was K—.

And through all the scientific congeries, which were far more extended than Leacraft could recognize, or even Dr. M— recall, was a more garrulous grouping of politicians, statesmen, diplomats, ministers, the well dressed circles of the rich, and the dillettantes, drawn to this unusual assemblage by the presence of the President.

The quiet and dull room, faded, and with contents tiresomely drilled into the exact alignments of a museum hall, took on an almost brilliant appearance. The fancy amused itself with the thought that it too felt, in its stagnated life, the35 unique occasion, and shook itself into a momentary wakefulness, to note and record its distinguished guests, that its streaked walls tried to hide their unseemly rents, and the multiplied models and charts struggled to look recent and familiar and appreciative, amid such intellectual tumult.

But now the audience was forgotten at that theatrical moment when the chairman and the lecturer advanced over the platform to assume the directive guidance of the evening. They did advance with that curious gaucherie which somehow always disables the scientific man in his official and public utterances, and seems, by some trick of compensation, the more unredeemable as the unfortunate victim of its cynical attachment is the more distinguished and renowned.

Dr. S— stepped gingerly forward, a tall, effective man with hair hardly sanguine in color, and quite conventional in arrangement, with a cerebral development, that somehow disappointingly dwarfed the lower contours of his face, domed and broad as it was, with much scholarly promise. He was followed by the speaker of the evening, Mr. Binn, who seemed half inclined to screen himself from observation behind the utterly inadequate profile of the famous Director. The two men momentarily catching the full assault of the numerous eyes, each pair among them being the visible battery of a questioning and critical mind behind it, underwent36 an obvious confusion of intention and movement, and became somewhat mixed up with the table and chairs, and with each other. The Director extricated himself, came forward to the edge of the platform, and in a voice of half propitiatory jocularity, introduced the subject, and the speaker. He alluded to the favorable conjunction of the meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and that of the National Academy of Science, which brought so many eminent thinkers and observers together, and administered an especial emphasis to the question to be considered this evening. He mentioned, with a deferential bow in the direction of the President, that they had all been deeply honored by the presence of the Chief Executive of the Nation, to whom perhaps, more than to anyone else in the brilliant audience, the grave question of the structural and geological stability of the Isthmus of Darien, was one of overshadowing interest, and he congratulated everyone that the subject was in the hand “of one whose geological fame was beyond dispute, and his carefulness of statement unimpeached,” and the Director sat down, pulling off to one side of the stage, lest his own refulgence might dim the legitimate monopoly of that article by Dr. Binn. Leacraft observed that as the lecturer unrolled his manuscript on the reading desk, the President leaned outward, adjusted his eyeglasses, and scrutinized the geologist,37 who, from a rather embarrassed fumbling with his sheets, seemed conscious of the inquisition. A moment later, as if satisfied with his inspection, the President leaned back, bulky and immobile, and became an absorbed listener.

Mr. Binn, well known for his lithological studies, and the possession of a good style, in the scientific sense, was a short man, evincing, under control, however, the peptic influences of years, with a face of decided legibility, in which sense and penetration seemed equally indicated.

He had provided himself with charts, which had been distended in an irregular line above his head, and to these he occasionally referred. His reading of the important pages before him was clear and audible, but totally neglectful, of the informing appliances in elocution, of melody of voice, accent and deliberation. The lecture was brilliant and distinguished, and quite comparable in its qualities to the serious people who had gathered in great intellectual force to receive its instructions.

“Mr. President, Dr. Smith and Ladies and Gentlemen,” began the speaker; “The area of the Panama Isthmus and the West Indies has been an area of successional changes very considerable in their amount, very persistent in their frequency. It embraces a tropical area contiguous on its Pacific side to a meridional section of the earth which is very unstable, and which almost monopolizes the contemporaneous volcanic energy of the earth. It adjoins, or is limited itself on the east, in the Atlantic, by the Antillean islets, the emergent crests of submerged volcanic vents. It could be presumptively held, on these grounds, that the Isthmus itself partook of these characters of inequilibrated39 crustal motions. It might be affirmed, with a fair amount of precision, that its future history would continue this impression.

“The West Indies, as defined by Hill, embracing the islands that with Cuba form a long convexity terminating in Trinidad, on the coast of S. America, represent to-day a disintegrated continent. They are supposed to have embodied a former geographical unity. It had terrestrial magnitude, and lay Atlantis-like between South America and North America, at a time when the present narrow neck of land upon which our eyes are now, as a nation, fixed with anxious preoccupation, was itself swept over by the confluent waters of the two oceans, and when at that point which now forms an attenuated avenue of intercourse between North and South America, the tides of a broad water way alternated in their allegiance to the East or West coasts of the separated continents; and possibly a precarious and fluctuating contribution from the warm Gulf Stream found its way into the Pacific.

“The discussion of this question opens up for our consideration the examination of the geological structure of these oscillating terranes, as to what these are made up of, and it is evident that we must reach some general conclusion as to the succession of the strata composing them, and their relative positions to each other, as whether they are, in the language of stratigraphy, conformable or unconformable.40 The inference and argument are simple. If we find that the rocks composing these sections are crystalline, ancient, and deeply bedded formations, presumably coexistent, so to speak, with the original or very early formative beds of the world, and referable to its beginnings, we are permitted, by all the analogies of induction and deduction, to assume that these rocks have at least a relative stability. On the other hand if our examination reveals the fact that they are recent deposits, more or less unconsolidated, easily disturbed in their positions, easily readjusted in their molecular or physical structure, then by the most unexceptional and matter-of-fact observation, we shall regard them as questionably permanent, indeed as unmistakably non-resistant to the subterranean forces of terrestrial mutation.

“Again it is clear that a pile of bricks, or of any other superimposed building blocks is the more secure, in its equilibrium, if the component parts overlie each other, along the broadest surfaces, and come in contact, or fit, as we say, in parallel position. If these bricks succeed each other in lines of brick that are flat, and then in lines that are vertical, or placed on their thinnest and narrowest edges, and these two contrasted positions alternate, or are irregularly disposed with reference to each other in the same wall, such a construction implies, involves, elements of weakness, and under the shock41 of any incident force would succumb in ruin more quickly, and more irretrievably than the former. If further, the latter building style had suffered ruptures and dislocations and the gaps or openings and broken surfaces of contact between its parts had been invaded or replaced by an irregular or incongruous assortment of ‘filling,’ differing from the original bricks in substance, texture and hardness, then we have a third pattern of composition that again is weaker than either of its predecessors. But further. If this least massive and most vulnerable type of structure has been subjected to repeated and considerable strains of elevation and depression, and strains recurrent at short intervals, then, without inspection, we know that its interior coherence has been much shattered, and that it has undergone a progressive dilapidation.

“But I am constrained to go one step farther in this hypothetical picture of structural defectiveness. To return to our wall of brick. It can be made up of bricks laid upon each other in consecutive tiers; it can be made up of tilted tiers of bricks, bricks laid on each other, but inclined to a horizontal plane, and finally it is conceivable that the bricks may be so arranged as to be inverted in their relations to the horizontal plane. The diagrams make clear these contrasted positions.

“Now of all these types of structures the last42 obviously best meets the requirements of a type which will prove the least susceptible to dislocation. I think that can be apprehended almost without explanation. A moment’s reflexion will make it conspicuous.

“The bricks tilted up in inclined tiers or beds, upon disturbance, if the cohesion between them is seriously impaired, tend to fall away from each other, and gravity increases the effects of the initial displacement. If the bricks lie flat they do not fall apart, upon the cessation of any push or upheaval, but remain disordered, falling back into some quasi-position of rest. If the bricks are inverted and form in section a series of lines converging to the base of the wall, their disarrangement is largely rectified by their own gravity, bringing them back into their first positions.

“In Geology strata overlying each other, in succession, as the bricks do when on their flat faces are called conformable, if they succeed, one over the other, with the edges or summits of the lower, abutting against the horizontal surfaces of the next, as do the bricks when they are placed in flat and vertical positions, in alternating strips, that is unconformability.

“If the strata are usually horizontal like the evenly piled series of bricks, they are called undisturbed; if inclined against each other, they are inclined, and they may make monoclinals, having43 one slope, or anti-clinals when they lean up against each other like the opposite sides of a peaked roof; or synclinal when inclined towards each other in an inverted position like the same roof overturned, with its ridge pole on the ground, and its inclined sides lifted into the air, or like the bricks in the last pattern of structure described.

“When we carry these similes into nature, we have all kinds of rocks, and we have them in mountains, in planes, and all the familiar configuration of the earth’s surface.

“Now we find that those portions of the earth immediately beneath our feet, extending for a mile or so into the surface of the earth, are variously made up of layers, strata, beds, formations, lying on one another, and conformable or unconformable, undisturbed or thrown into anticlinal or synclinal folds; that the material in its general mineral character, is limestone, marls, or sands and sandstone, slates, clays, metamorphic rocks like gneiss and quartzite, etc., and associated with them are granites which may have been melted lava-like rock before it cooled and crystallized, while there is plentiful evidence of abundant outflows of igneous, melted or viscid rocks; evidences of lines of eruption, of foci, or craters of eruption. Thus, as in the brick structure, where unrelated and later material has been introduced in fissures, gaps, openings, holes, etc., of the walls, we have some of the architecture of44 the earth, an original bedded structure invaded by very contrasted substances, and which give to that architecture, as in the brick wall of our homely illustration, lack of homogeneity, and lack of strength.

“In the West Indies and on the Isthmus of Panama we have the states of instability which we have signalized, viz., secondary deposits of a somewhat loose and unconsolidated material, and wanting in the deeply bedded crystalline rocks which in New England, in the Adirondacks, and the Piedmont or higher regions abutting on the coastal plain in the northern United States, furnish a solid, and probably fundamentally deep seated pediment of resistance to shock. Again in the West Indies and in the Isthmus, we have the beds unconformable over each other, which you will recall in our symbol of the brick wall, was a feature of weakness; also these unconformable beds are inclined in anti-clinals, a further aspect of structural insolvency; and further these beds have been widely, pervasively, in places, infiltrated and ruptured by subsequent introductions of volcanic substance, ashes, lavas and intrusive magmas. Thus the geological aggregates present the previously illustrated condition of fragility, and the absence of the so-called tectonic elements of rigidity. But still one step more in our disheartening study of this equatorial problem.

45

“I, a few moments past, called your attention to the fact that ‘if this least massive and most vulnerable type of structure has been subjected to repeated and considerable strains of elevation and depression, and strains recurrent at short intervals, then, without inspection, we know that its interior has been much shattered, and that it has undergone a progressive dilapidation.’

“Precisely such catastrophes are discovered in the history of the geological region now before us. The islands of the West Indies have been subjected to great changes of elevation. They have risen and fallen during the last geological age—the Tertiary—perhaps four times. In their rise they have gathered to themselves marginal extensions of land, now hidden beneath the ocean at comparatively slight depths, while they have at the same time doubtless become blended and unified into a great Antillean continent. This continent was dominated by volcanic protuberances whose growth upward, over accumulations of ashes, has been again symptomatic of undermining operations threatening later subsidence and submergence.

“In our day we have been called on to deplore the ravages caused by the eruptions of Mt. Pelee and La Soufriere, on the Islands of Martinique and St. Vincent, and it is natural to insist that regions which have a precarious autonomy, in which such volcanoes can exist, must be regarded with46 diffidence, as permanent geographical areas.

“It was pointed out by Prof. Robert T. Hill that the current, and formerly undisputed, conception that the Rocky Mountains of North America and the Andes of South America were not only analogous physiographically, but univalent in fact; that the continuous elevation of Central America brought them into an oblique alignment; and that their mutual prolongations met in the Isthmus of Panama, was erroneous. It involved a complete misconception. It was a geographical fallacy, and leads to misleading conclusions as to the permanency of this intermedian region, itself pre-eminently individualized and liberated from the circumstances and implications of either the Rocky Mountain Continent or the Andean Continent. This area has a different geological ancestry. To-day it invokes an especial treatment, and possibly expects a future, contrasted with that of the two great Continents whose longitudinal extension it contravenes by its east and west lines, by the prerogatives of a separate origin.

“The Rocky Mountains terminate in the plateau of Mexico, ‘a little south,’ says Hill, ‘of the capital of that republic; and that the mountains have no orographic continuity, or other features in common with those of the Central American region.’

“And the same authority, describing the terminus47 of the Andes, says, ‘The northern end of the Andean System lies entirely east of the Central American region, and is separated from it by the Rio Atrato—the most western of the great Rivers of Columbia. In fact, the deeply eroded drainage valley of this stream nearly severs the Pacific coast from the republic of Columbia, and the isthmian region, from the South American continent.’

“The Central American volcanoes belong to the type that is repeated along the Caribbean shores of Colombia and Venezuela, and those in the Isthmus of Panama, and those of the great Antilles. The genesis of this American Mediterranean land-aggregate was in an independent geological impulse, and the land aggregate itself impinged by intersection upon the dominant land surfaces of North and South America. To bring together North and South America as a simultaneous geological phenomena is wrong, to make them other than an accidental geographical continuity questionable. It is this intermediate zone—the Antillean continent with lateral elongations, grasping within its continental solidarity the parallel zones of Central America and the Isthmus, that gives them terrestrial unity. Extend the axis of the Rocky Mountains, and it passes almost two thousand miles west of the coast of South America; extend the axis of the Andes and it bisects the western extremity of Cuba, and passes along the48 seaboard of the United States.

“There is no exact geological identity here, although there is the strictest geographical homology. Each is the backbone of a continent, each upheaved and variously modified, igneously invaded sediments, derived from some pre-existent continent. They may be brought into a just comparison, but they are not strictly parts of one phenomenon. They are, however, more closely related to each other, than the Antillean areas are to either. This Antillean area, I shall here call the Columbian Continent, as the great discoverer landed at its two east and west extremities—the land-fall on San Salvador in the Bermudas, and on the coast of Honduras in Central America, as well as at Cuba, and at the mouths of the Orinoco—and his bones rested for a long time in the soil of San Domingo. It—this Columbean Continent—is a significant intercalation. It unites North and South America, but it unites them subject to the phases of its own generation.

“Let us understand this. There is a system of growth, a law, if I may so term it, of geomorphic sameness in the development of large, or for that matter, small geological territories. The familiar story of the growth of our North American continent has been often told. It is a commonplace of text books. The wide, triangular Archæan nucleus to the north, the oldest rocks—outlines and outliers49 down the east, and the same in the west—drew the framing limits of the continent at the first, to be filled in, up and out, by the momentous additions through the ages of advancing time. In Europe less well or simply defined boundaries, the growth together rather of divided islands, prevailed, and the picture of development was quite varied, from the picture in this western world. Again in Africa, with edges of uplift and centres of depression another geological tale with its incidents and accessories infinitely modified, comes into view. And in this prevalence of structural style, we, geologically speaking, find a prevalence of certain geological phases or conditions.

“What were these in the growth and disappearance of this Columbian continent? What they have been, we can, with rational probability, assume they will be.

“The Columbian continent, I have called a dismembered, a fractionized continent. If from Cuba through Haiti, Porto Rico, and the lesser Antilles one land surface obtained, and the now submerged and radiating gorges, found only as submarine canyons, were above the ocean, becoming, as Prof. Spencer has laboriously proven, sub-aerial river valleys, we should have one presumable phase of this continent, the phase of its maximum cohesion and extension. And such a phase is measurably or, for purposes of argumentative inference, sensibly50 established. It is said with careful premeditation by Hill that ‘the numerous islets of its eastern border, the Bahamas and Windward chain, which extend from Florida to the mouth of the Orinoco, are merely the summits of steep submarine ridges, which divide the depths of the Atlantic from those of the Gulf of Mexico, and Caribbean sea; were their waters a few feet lower, these ridges would completely landlock the seas from the ocean.’

“When thus constituted, it afforded a display of physical features of astonishing contrasts, and its mere scenic resources were doubtless of unparalleled splendor, and, as to-day, it was involved in the luxuriant productivity of the tropics. Its mountains measuring now as high as eleven thousand feet above the sea level, were then thrust upward into stupendous peaks, by the addition of the sloping miles which are now below the ocean. We can imagine the extreme wonderfulness of this continent, uniting in an unbroken but marvellously varied expression of physical and vegetable contrast, the plains, valleys, and mountains of Cuba, the towering and draped peaks of Jamaica, the confusion of the gloomy vales and ranges of Hayti and San Domingo, the levels and coastal ranges of Porto Rico, and the manifold picturesque charms of the Lesser Antilles, lifting high into the ceaseless currents of the trade winds the smoking summits51 of a chain of disturbed volcanoes. All, in the boundless abundance of its natural endowment of loveliness, and productivity, formed an unique and extravagantly ornamented landscape, an area whose highest elevations contemplated the remote waters of the shrunk Atlantic, from pinnacles raised ten to twenty thousand feet above its azure waves. Nor is this all. This hypothetical—the Columbian—continent, may have had connexions with Central America through projecting and peninsulated capes, reaching through Jamaica to Yucatan or Honduras, and wide intervals of dividing gulfs of water, in all probability sundered it from North or South America, and it remained, as I here emphatically insist, it remains to-day, a geographical and geological phenomenon, unrelated to the great continents, to which through their preponderating value, the mind almost unpremeditatingly assigns it.

“But at the period of this greatest elevation, when this tropical region assumed individual independence, and embodied a geognostic importance comparable to the vast continents it lay between—at this time—the Isthmus of Panama did not exist, and through a wide water-way the Atlantic mingled its tides with those of the Pacific.

“We are thus led to believe that as between the West Indian terranes and the neck of land now embraced in the Isthmus of Panama, we have a relation52 of Isostacy.’”

The speaker, armed with this formidable verbal equipment of attack upon his audience, had walked to the front of the platform, and, harboring some unusual confidence in his powers, had deserted his manuscript. Isostacy, he had realized, possessed probably unqualified novelty, and by way of assurance, lest its terrors might empty the hall, he assumed a colloquial relation to his dazed hearers, and offered an explanation of this unexpected mystery. “Isostacy,” he resumed, “is simply this: Equilibrium. It is the maintenance of average level—as if one part of the earth’s surface was pushed up, above a mean level, then the requirements of Isostacy would depress another part, below it. We can also call it the adjustment of a changing load, as if through depression, from the dumping upon the floor of the ocean of a great amount of sediment, derived from the land surface of the earth, neighboring areas of the land of the oceanic floors were raised. Two contiguous regions might—and,” the lecturer turned directly toward the President, who in his own earnestness of attention had elbowed himself round into a direct line with Mr. Binn, “in the case of the West Indian continent and the Isthmus of Panama, have maintained between them, an up and down reciprocity of movement, as, when one was up, the other was down, and vice versa.”

53

Mr. Binn looked introspectively at the walls and ceilings of the room, as if engaged in a mental rehearsal and review of his staggering statement, and returned to his desk and manuscript, satisfied that he had thrown the assembly into an uneasy apprehension of danger. He again began his reading: “It is true, if I understand Mr. Spencer correctly, that the Atlantic ocean was cut off by the elevation of the Columbian Continent from even the interior basins of the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico, at least in early pliocene times; that these depressions were then broad plains receiving in part the drainage of the Antillean highlands; this again emptying into the Pacific ocean. But this is not a proven theory, and it involves an extravagant readjustment of the physical features of a region that to my mind more expressively can be considered immemorially permanent, in their general aspects, at least. I reiterate the reciprocity of movement between the Antillean Continent and the Isthmus of Panama. The cause I have suggested may be untenable—but there seems strong geological proof of some such alternating relation between the west and east sides of this inter-related region, the Great Antilles on one side, the Isthmus of Central America on the other.

“Our survey of the question produces one impression, and that very forcibly, viz.: that this narrow ridge of separation is ephemeral, that it is54 perishable, that under the tests or against the shocks of earth strains, it will succumb, and”—the lecturer raised his voice, half turned deferentially to the chairman, Dr. Smith, who accepted the attention with an assenting nod—“again the waters of the two oceans will unite, and the impetuous violence of the rushing oceanic river, the Gulf Stream, that now races and boils through the Caribbean Sea, will fling its torrential waves across this divide into the Pacific.”

The audience that with manifest absorption had thus far followed the speaker, was disturbed. A movement of chairs, a half audible protest of whispered incredulity, and a sensible emanation around him, of mental repugnance to such a catastrophe, made Leacraft momentarily turn his eyes from Mr. Binn to the frowning countenances at his side.

“But,” the speaker raised his voice with reassuring quickness, as if to stay the emotional resistance he had aroused, “we have no reason to believe that in our lifetime, or the lifetimes of many generations yet to come, so strange a reversal of present conditions should occur. And again, that in this matter, we may be calmly judicial, we have reason at least for a moderate fear. Whatever state of unstable equilibrium, of unadjusted balance is implied, or actually is resident in this section of our earth, a section that has undergone the extremes of hypsometrical displacement, we may conceive that55 like the explosive cap, or the compressed spring, or the bent bow, it will win instant relief upon the impact of any force, deep-seated enough, and powerful enough, to liberate its tectonic strain.

“I am thus brought to consider that world-wide source of terrestrial deformation—earthquakes; but I should forget the indulgence of your patience up to this point, if I should now undertake any partial review of these astonishing and alarming occurrences. I am deeply impressed, however, with an aspect of the subject that demands attention, that throws into sharp relief the prophecies of disaster, with which, willingly or unwillingly, we have all become familiar.”

The lecturer here rolled forward to the front of the platform, a blackboard on which in colored chalks the earth, looking somewhat like a shortened egg, with its north and south poles situated on the long, flattened sides, was depicted; while a black line or axis drawn through it terminated in the Sahara Desert on one side, and near the Society Islands on the other. Two ominous circles in vermillion were described on it, concentric respectively with the ends of the black line, one sweeping along the western coast of North and South America, and crossing the Isthmus of Panama, the other encircling the coasts of Africa and gathering in their fatal course the Azores, Canaries, and the Cape Verde Islands. And on both these terrifying56 curves, in black letters, was printed the hypnotic intimation “Belt of Weakness or Earthquake Ring.” The effect on the audience was sufficiently impressive. The staring rude drawing around which a cyclone of blue scratches, purporting to be clouds, was expressively raging, intensely steeped the observers in a spell of wonder and trepidation. Even Leacraft, by the contagion of a common obsession, craned his neck, and fixed his eyes with a stupid absorption upon the crazy and paradoxical diagram.

The speaker continued, noticing with undisguised satisfaction the ocular concentration produced by his obnoxious figure, with its anomalous portents: “It is well known that we have in the boundaries, or shore lines of the Pacific, a surprisingly larger number of earthquakes recorded, than anywhere else in the world, and this seems in some way coincident with the prevalence of active volcanoes in the same region. Prof. Haughton has enumerated for the world 407 volcanoes, 225 of which are active. Of these latter, 172 are on the margin of the Pacific. Prof. Milne, who lived a long time in Japan, for the express purpose of studying the earthquake problem of those islands, has observed the surprising frequency of their earthquakes, and it is a volcanic zone they occupy. We have in contradistinction to this area about the Pacific a reversed circle which envelopes the western coast of57 Africa, and by this chart,” here the lecturer pushed back the blackboard, and, standing alongside of it, began, with a pointer of elucidation, a direct allocution to that subject of confusion, “we are made immediately cognizant of the opposite and yet symmetrical disposition of these zones. This should have from its simplicity and a quasi-permanency, in its phenomena—its earthquake phenomena—a general explanation. The explanation is not reassuring; it is not proven, but it is accepted by many, and has, for me, a very reasonable probability. Let us at least not recoil from its consideration.”

Under the encouragement of this exhortation, the audience seemed to slide forward in their seats a few inches, with the impetus of a renewed hope.

“This chart,” said the speaker, “presents to you the structural conception of Professors Jeans and Sollas, of the form of the earth. It is the shape more or less familiar to you, commonly known as a pear-shaped earth, the tip carrying the Sahara Desert on its bulging top, and its broader and inferior extremity holding the disturbed Pacific basin.

“Now it makes a very practical difference what the shape of the earth is, because the shape affects the stability, has an important influence upon the fluctuating strains under its surface. Observe that the chart has developed, upon two circles of instability, these lines of weakness,” and the lecturer swept his pointer over the contrasted belts, one58 around Africa, and the other inflicting the west coast of North America with its ominous intersection. The pointer paused on the latter circle, stopping near the position of San Francisco. “You recall,” the speaker continued, “the terrifying affliction of this great city in 1906, and the pall of discouragement and gloom which it cast over the region in which the city naturally held the sway of mercantile supremacy. Now it was shown by Prof. H. H. Turner, the English astronomer, that San Francisco lies on one of the two great earthquake rings, which surround the end of the pear, as in this chart, like wrinkles produced by the crowding down of the protuberances under the force of gravitation. And, according to this view, such rings, marking lines of weakness and yielding in the rocks would not exist, if the earth was, in its shape, what we most usually assume to be its figure, an oblate spheroid, with the present north and south poles at the ends of its axis of rotation, to which axis of rotation the rest of the earth was symmetrically disposed.

“The existence of these earthquake and volcanic rings was known before the pear theory had been defined, but then of course their relation with any peculiar form of the earth was not understood. The ring surrounding the Pacific, or butt end of the pear includes a large part of the shores of the Pacific Ocean, running from Alaska down to the western59 coast of South America, then across to the East Indies, and back, around the other side, through Japan. The other ring is somewhat smaller in diameter, including the earthquake regions of West Africa and the Atlantic Islands. Now the point of interest is this, as Garrett P. Serviss has significantly said, ‘If the pear hypothesis is accepted, and the two great earthquake rings are found to be definitely connected with the strains to which the planet is subjected in its effort to attain a state of equilibrium, under the forces of its own gravitation and rotation, which tend to compel it into spheroidal shape, then we have a perfectly rational explanation of the existence of certain places where earthquakes are sure to occur more or less frequently, and of other places, like eastern America, where they are very rare and never of maximum violence.’

“Every one present this evening,” and the lecturer gave an embracing wave of his hand, “knows of the singular aberrancy in the rotational motion of the earth, which has been often geographically described as the ‘wobbling of the poles.’ Astronomers have proven a real tipping of the poles alternately to one side, and then to the other, a swaying of the poles like the recurrent oscillations of a top as it ‘goes to sleep.’ But this swaying in the earth’s case is periodic and unchanging. It is sometimes rather abrupt, and at other times the60 tipping is regulated and progressive; but it is established, and has had a generally accepted explanation, in the attraction of the swelling equatorial prominence of the earth by the sun and moon, while suggestions have also been made that it was due to internal shiftings of mass, or to changes of exterior weightings, through the alternate and variable formation and melting of polar snows.

“But it has in the light of the present theory of the pear-shaped earth a new and rather startling explanation.

“We are, however, this evening, not so much concerned with the broader cosmic aspects of this state of affairs, as with the immediate consequences to the permanence of our land surfaces.

“The mechanics of this condition and its possible effectiveness in developing contrary placed zones of rupture can be easily conceived. This awkwardly conditioned sphere, revolving upon a shorter diameter—revolving also with astonishing velocity—and bearing at either extremity of its longer axis unequal masses, is obviously in a state of peripheral strain, that is, it is in strain at such distances from either of the disproportioned ends, the one in the south seas, the other in the desert of Sahara, as would represent the more or less sharply sloping surface from its average rotundity, towards these oblique extremities.

“Gentlemen,” the speaker seemed excitedly61 rushing into danger, but with a fixed expression, aimed somewhere at the blank and uninfluential physiognomies at the back of the hall; like that of an engineer who can neither restrain nor reverse the speed which may either carry him safely over a tottering support or plunge his train to the bottom of the gulch; “Gentlemen, the Isthmus of Panama is in this zone; the Canal is there!” this last reminder uttered with no very reasonable deliberation, “and it is to my mind an absolutely established certainty, that the secular instability of that region, shown by geological investigation, will again become apparent; and”—he raised his voice with a kind of exhalation of defiance, as if he spurned equivocation and invited denial—“and, it will become apparent with increased violence.

“This conclusion is unwelcome; it may seem destructive to those natural hopes which the approaching completion of this wonderful enterprise—the Panama Canal—have so freely and inevitably fostered. Science in the last resource to her councils must be austerely judicial. She cannot take cognizance of man’s projects or respect his hopes. The Panama Canal as part of the Isthmus of Panama participates in all the vicissitudes of the latter, and we know that those vicissitudes mean dislocation and subsidence. When such frightful results will happen, it is impossible to say; that they must happen, we can positively assert.”

62

The lecture was over. The lecturer retreated, and again repeated his deferential nod to the chairman, Dr. Smith, as if importuning his assistance in corroboration of his mournful vaticination. The audience still remained immobile, coagulated into a sort of mental prostration by this dismal prophecy, and yet again as if contemplating, like a cat’s stagnation, preparatory to its murderous spring, some outward and physical resentment. And the spring came.

In the middle of the hall arose a tall and alert figure, perhaps noticeably bent, as if from the effort of attention, or perchance from forensic habits; for the man, as Dr. M— quickly informed Leacraft, was Senator Tillman, of South Carolina. The face of this sudden expostulant was handsome in the extreme, and the features, strongly marked, were blended together in an expression of youthfulness that seemed to win a strange charm from their association with the white hair, and the just beginning wrinkles of advancing years.

Senator Tillman lost no time. His interruption was decisively intentional. It was part of an impulsive impassioned nature. Shaking his index finger, which, from long practice, pointed undeviatingly at the object of his remarks, the Senator, in a voice harsh and penetrating, began: “My dear sir, we are indebted to you for information. But we stop there. We are not required to credit63 you with prediction. This scientific discussion will not alter our confidence nor stop the work on the Canal. It can’t. I’m not inclined to think that this nation will be stultified by the oracles of geology; it is a matter of simple determination that science makes mistakes—and I would advise no one in this room within the hearing of your voice, and no one outside of it, to whose eyes your reported views will appear, to allow them a scintilla of serious import.

“In 1906, Mark Smith, a voteless delegate to Congress from Arizona, told this story: ‘Once,’ commented Smith, ‘a couple of my friends were riding through a desolate bit of country in Arizona near the Mexican border. Presently they came upon a man who was hanging by the neck from the limb of a tree. A couple of buzzards were roosting above him, but they made no attack upon him. My friends drove away the buzzards and discovered on the breast of the dead man a placard bearing these words: “This was a very bad man in some respects and a damn sight worse in others.“

“‘My friends accounted for the moderation of the buzzards on the theory that they had read the placard.’

“That was all Smith had to say, but it was assumed that he agreed with the opinion of the other men about the subject of their discussion. Well, I64 beg to say of science that it is very bad in some respects, and a damn sight worse in others, and its present conclusion in regard to the Isthmus of Panama is one of the latter.”

The audience, long before this denoument to the Senator’s retort was reached, had arisen; the President had arisen also, and stood with his back to the stage, facing the Senator, steadily growing more unrestrained and angry. Leacraft and Dr. M— were half standing, their hands supporting them on the backs of the chairs of the men in front of them. The scene was interesting, and the first movement toward repression of the Senator succumbed to curiosity, and in all directions, the intelligent faces about them were variously disturbed by symptoms of vexation or amusement. It was uncommonly entertaining. Mr. Binn and Dr. Smith, with becoming smiles of moderation, were drawn to the front of the platform, and no one, after the Senator had swung into the torrential flow of his remonstrance, thought of anything else but to catch, almost breathlessly, his words. When he concluded, a wave of laughter, genuine, but a little nervous, went through the assembly. Then the President stepped to the aisle, turned a moment to shake the hand of the lecturer, and offer him his congratulations, and bowed to Dr. Smith. In an instant the aisle way was clear. The President moved on between the applauding people, and as he65 came opposite Senator Tillman, who had himself pressed toward the egress, as if to intercept him he stopped. There was a quick, instinctive restraint. Everyone waited for his word. “Senator Tillman,” the President spoke with sharp emphasis, “I thank you for restoring our spirits. I remember Mark Smith. I remember he took my advice in accepting the Statehood Bill. You may have misapplied his story, but you have at least furnished us with a novel reason for encouragement.”

Again the applause broke out, and the President disappeared, the audience decorously dispersed and followed him, and Leacraft and Dr. M— soon found themselves on Pennsylvania avenue, walking rapidly and silently.

Leacraft finished his task in the west. The disputes were smoothed out, the differences adjudicated, and a problem or so which had mixed up the overseer and the Mining Superintendent at the mines in an acute wrangle, disposed of. He was back to Washington on his way to Baltimore and Sally Garrett. The invitation from Ned Garrett to visit Baltimore and go with Sally and himself to Gettysburg on the twentieth of May, had been accepted, and every movement he had made, each step he had taken, since that memorable ninth of April when he first learned of the complexion of political affairs in the United States, and had heard Mr. Binn’s remarkable lecture, had been thoughtfully adjusted to getting back in time for the pleasure and the opportunity of seeing Sally.

His own earnest desire to possess her for himself,67 to compel her wayward and tantalizing spirit to acknowledge his mastery had increased, and like most young men in similar relations to the unknown quantity of susceptibility in a popular young woman’s heart his anxiety grew with every lessening minute between the present and the moment of confession. But at any rate Leacraft felt no indecision. Come what might he had no misgivings about his own feelings, and lingered, with no trepidation, over the thought of asking Miss Garrett to marry him. Defeat was preferable to the hardship of doubt. He would be less miserable after rejection, if rejection it was, than he was now; tormented with an immeasurable uncertainty. And his English heaviness, that semi-sepulchral seriousness which by some amusing compensation in the gifts of Nature is mingled with the very substantial merits of these people, induced a rather grim sadness in his mind, and he reached the door of 72 Monument Square, Baltimore, with no actual palpitation, but with a strained sense of the importance of his own fate which made him grave.

Leacraft had many personal merits. He had an excellent mind, a reasonably fearless heart, a sense of justice, itself the best gift of God to man, and a face, which if not distinguished by remarkable beauty became, under the excitement of feeling, and in the more propitious circumstances of good health, attractive, from a manly comeliness, not68 handsome perhaps, but certainly not commonplace. And he had physique. He was tall and strong, and his strength acknowledged obedience to an intelligence which made it formidable.

The door of the quiet house before which he stood, opened and there—Leacraft almost stumbled into unconsciousness—as if expecting him, as if flying on the wings of—if not Love, something else uncommonly pleasant—as if impatient to cross the laggard moments which separated them—was Sally Garrett.

It would be difficult to reproduce in words this difficult and puzzling young lady; difficult to impart by any means less effective than painting or have proven ineffective, unless somehow helped out by personal acquaintanceship—the impression which gave both to her active admirers, and to those who, for reasons best known to themselves, had tried to forget her charms. Sally was decidedly pretty, she readily, under the phases of excitement and gayety moved upward into the realms of beauty. She was fair, not large, delicately modelled, with perniciously accomplished eyes that looked out from beneath the pencilled eye-brows, and under their long lashes, with all kinds of provocative invitations, that were no sooner accepted than their desperate little giver revoked them with derision and anger.

Her lips, of course met the most scrupulous requirements69 of the critic, and her teeth were as fatally perfect. In coloring she furnished an example of protean adaptibility. The emblems of fury were seen in her flushed cheeks, and the tokens of contrition in the same when they grew pale with grief. This was the secret of her compelling art. She bowed to all emotions, and as they controlled her they set upon her face the evidence of their presence, refined by the resistance of a nature which abhorred wrong feelings, improved by the welcome of a spirit which was magnanimous and sympathetic. No wonder that Leacraft loved her. No wonder that a bewildered lot of other young men were in a similar predicament.

I presume at this point I owe some deference to feminine importunity. How was Sally dressed? Well; Sally had good taste, perhaps a trifle insubordinate by nature, but a rigorous subjection to good social usage had made it fairly unimpeachable. At that particular moment in the afternoon of May 27th, 1909, after his extrication from the subterranean embraces of the Baltimore and Ohio tunnel, and an uninspired walk along Charles street, Sally to Leacraft’s eyes presented the acme of sartorial perfection. She wore a white lisseree gown in which were inwoven threads of gray which gave it “atmosphere,” a kind of filmyness quite indescribable, but very inviting—above that, a waist of almost the same color, without the gray70 threads, and fitting tightly at the wrists with faintly voluminous sleeves—a stock of daffodill yellow encircled by an aqua-marine necklace, and in her clustering golden brown cascades of hair, rushed up into a chaste confinement between pearl-starred combs—she had thrust an amethyst aigrette. It was a willful thought, a vagary of sheer carelessness. But it looked well, and—Leacraft might have danced a jig (if he knew how) of pure ecstacy; and if his impurturbable nature would have permitted so gross a jest—it was one Leacraft had himself given her only last Christmas. You can see or infer ladies that your attractive sister, given, as I have tried to do, her natural adaptibility for embellishment, must have looked more than pleasing, that to a young man approaching her with idolatry in his heart and prayers on his lips she must have looked very nearly like the embodyment of the feminine ideal, like that inscrutable loveliness which first wins from a man his careless notice, and the next moment has him chained to its feet in servitude.

Well; such were the circumstances, and Leacraft hastily removing his hat looked with all his eyes at the fair vision, and found himself embarrassed in speaking his formal salutation:

“How do you do, Miss Garrett?” “Why, Mr. Leacraft,” replied the arch tormenter; “I thought it was Ned. He has just gone to get our tickets for71 to-morrow. And you, Mr. Leacraft, go with us? You will see our great battle field and hear our President. I’m sure you will find both wonderful. But come in, Mr. Leacraft.”

The vision with intoxicating grace swung back the door and preceded the tongue-tied suitor to the parlor. Mr. Leacraft left his hat and valise in the hall, and followed. Another instant, they were both seated in the deep room from whose walls the portraits of ancient and meagre, or stately and peptic Garretts, looked down upon them, and in looking were amused or distressed, according to their nature, at the display of modern elegance, helped out by a tasteful condescension to antiquities and heirlooms.

The next moment was successfully engaged in greeting Mrs. Garrett, the mother of the vision, a dignified and well preserved lady, who honored all her children’s friends with motherly hospitality, but resented mentally all masculine strategy, whose ulterior aims were the destruction of her daughter’s peace of mind. Her devotion to her daughter was itself part of a devotion which made every thing which bore the Garrett name sacred in her eyes, and which reflected a family pride, unmitigating in its self-exaction, unrelenting in its engrossing enmity to all that offended it.

“Ned will be glad to find you here Mr. Leacraft. It was only last night that Ned said he wondered72 if you had got rid of the business engagements that took you out west, and expressed himself willing to believe that if you had, you would not forget his invitation for Decoration Day at Gettysburg.” It was the voice of Mrs. Garrett, a little somnolent in quality, with a subdued melodiousness, and monotonously even in tone.

“Indeed, Mrs. Garrett, few things could have less readily escaped my mind. It has been an alleviation to think of it when I got bored with quarrelsome miners. Whatever good luck I have had in settling the mine troubles came from my own eagerness to get back to Baltimore,” and Leacraft turned with, actually, a very grave face towards the meditative Sally.

“Oh, Mr. Leacraft,” said that unconscionable woman, “we have Ned’s old classmate, Brig Barry, to go with us to Gettysburg. He is in the army, a lieutenant, who has fought Indians on the reservations, has lots of medals for bravery and is just the best thing in the way of a man you ever saw. I half think your English prejudices will be a little discouraged when you see him, or else you will love him as well as we do,” and this merciless compound of mischief and bewitching beauty looked out of her blue gray eyes with an absurd intimation of solitude which half made Leacraft forget manners.

“Yes,” acquiesced Mrs. Garrett, “Mr. Barry is a73 great favorite. I almost fear that Mr. Leacraft will find him unreasonably popular.”

“I am sure,” replied that rapidly aspiring sycophant, “that I ought to feel no inclination to impugn Miss Garrett’s good taste.”

This was so evident an affectation to shield a too obvious chagrin that the wicked object of the inuendo simply laughed outright and was vicious enough to reply that “she had never felt it necessary for her own comfort to have her own personal opinions endorsed by any one,” a cruel barb that lacerated the tender Englishman feelings immensely.

The next instant the front door opened with a rough shake, and a commotion of hurrying feet announced the arrival of Ned Garrett. Ned Garrett was a typical American of the best breed, and with the most unmistakable marks of that American suavity, sweetness and splendid confidence, not a whit tainted with assumption or vanity, which makes the American man the best type of man the world over. He, too, was tall and fair, with fascinating aplomb, and a frank surrender to the claim of friendship, without a too credulous endorsement of all social paper not readily negotiable. As he saw Leacraft he ran to him with a glad welcome of surprise and pleasure. “Good, Burney; I am right glad to see you. I knew you would not forget us, and you will have great reason to be satisfied with74 yourself for coming. The affair at Gettysburg to-morrow will be splendid. The President will give us something characteristic, the day will be the Nation’s, and the reunion of the veterans of both sides—you know this country once tried to strangle itself with its own hands—will be honored by a tremendous turn-out of people. I know,”—with a laugh,—“that you Englishmen hate crowds, unless they are turned to good account in celebrating the Lord Mayor’s day, or the jubilee of a king, or something swell and uninteresting, but it won’t hurt you to see the meaning of a great land’s reverence for its fallen dead,” and the big fellow full of enthusiasm, his handsome countenance dilated with pride, shook Leacraft’s hand, who was quite as delighted to greet his friend, whom he appreciated on his own account, without considering his influential relations to the desirable Sally.

Sally and her mother were now standing and, with, from the former a smile of approval and from the latter a gesture of satisfaction the two ladies departed, a servant appeared, and the young men ascended the stairs to prepare for dinner.

A variety of intentions had been coursing through Leacraft’s mind, and while ostensibly he was engaged in the commonplaces of address an interior agitation of plans and designs, all indubitably pointed towards the denouement of his visit, were tingling through his cerebral cortex with various75 success. He felt a sudden pressure of prudence assert itself, as if by some sort of psychological premonition he was made aware of the danger of temerity.

Left by Ned Garrett to assume the conventional apparel for dinner, and lingering with a delighted inspection of the details of his bedroom which he thought just reflected, to the nice point of a modest assertion of feminine adroitness, a really exquisite taste, he ran over the possible and best programme for the short campaign he felt it necessary to devise for the capture of the gentle and ethereal enemy. As he gazed, with increasing uneasiness, and poorly repressed envy at Henry’s piquant and picturesque colored sketches of “A Virginia Wedding,” and “The Departure of the Bride,” which offered themselves so suggestively between the white curtains on the saffron tinted paper, he came to this conclusion. He would that evening, if the occasion presented itself for a really favorable interview, let Sally know how much he thought of her, and how hopelessly unhappy he must become, if she could furnish him with no encouragement. That would do just now; but when they got to Gettysburg he might expect to find a convenient moment to be more explicit, indeed to urge her to the critical extremity of telling him what he might hope for.

This progressive method he fancied promised76 the best results, and, his thoughts still recalling with infatuation the uncalled for insertion of his aigrette in her hair on the very day when he was expected, he imagined if there was not absolute surrender on Sally’s part now, there might be compromising negotiations for surrender later.

With complacency, he looked at himself in the glass, walked to the hallway and descended. He had reached the broad stairway which entered the centre of the first floor of this sumptuous home, descending on the two sides in a series of separate steps, and then uniting into a wide terrace of steps, expanding upon the hall at the bottom, and guarded by a balustrade, which ended in two newel posts of surprising proportions, each carrying an enormous Rokewood vase, from which sprang a mingled white and red exuberance of sweet alyssum and geranium. As Leacraft stood at the top of the terrace of steps, he commanded a full view of the lower hall. And right beneath him, at the foot of the terrace, under the Rokewood vases, he saw Sally Garrett—the girl whom a moment ago he had with some unction and self-flattery ventured to think was not averse to his attentions—pinning on the lapel of the evening suit of a most offensively good looking young man, a boutonniere of geranium and alyssum, filched (the theft was evident) from the great vase above their heads, and to accomplish which, it seemed to the maddened observation of77 Leacraft, that the young man must have lifted the young lady. This was a conjunction of agencies too terrible to dwell on with equanimity, and in pure fright Leacraft stopped a moment, and became an involuntary spy upon proceedings evidently not intended for an inspection so inimical as his.

It was Sally’s voice: “Well, Brig, I must confess that as an accomplice in crime you are shockingly cool. It was quite unnecessary for you to expect more than the flowers; and yet”—Leacraft seemed to hit the balustrade with his foot. The interruption was perhaps involuntary. In Leacraft’s condition, human nature could not stand a more excruciating strain. Sally looked up. So did the young man. “Oh, Mr. Leacraft, this is fortunate. I want you and Mr. Barry to be excellent friends. Mr. Barry is wonderfully strong, and you are so wise. With his agility, and your advice, I will have two escorts to-morrow that will save me from any exertion of mind or body. Mr. Barry will help me over the hard places, and you will explain things. Pardon,” with a coquettish glance at her companion and a demure courtesy to Leacraft; “you must go through the usual introductions. My cousin, Mr. Barry, Mr. Leacraft. Remember, I rely upon both of you, and you must be as amicable as doves,” and with that equivocal enforcement of neutrality, this impossible beauty vanished.

Ned Garrett appeared, and saved the situation,78 or at least diminished an insufferable embarrassment. The three men were the next instant summoned to dinner. They were met at the door of the dining-room by Mr. Garrett, a tall gentleman, still giving evidence of an athletic youth. Mr. Garrett was a man somewhat tormented with impatience, but genial withal, and possessing a singular power of rapid utterance, conjoined also with the power of business-like demonstration. He shook hands with Leacraft cordially, and addressed a salutation of flattering familiarity to Mr. Barry.

Leacraft had suffered a very staggering blow, as he recalled the affair of the stairway, and he fell back, with only a half-satisfied security, upon Sally’s intimation that this unwelcome intruder—the Brig Barry of her previous encomiums—was a cousin. And the plague of it all was that he (Leacraft) was overpoweringly conscious of this same Brig Barry’s indisputable charms. Mr. Brig was a type of physical perfection. He carried on straight, but not too broad, shoulders, a finely shaped head, such which, at their best, are only seen in America; a head which announced to the world its intelligent emotions through the medium of an expressive face, wherein brown eyes, dark, straight eyebrows, a strong, large mouth, an aquiline nose, and blue veined temples, overhung by short, curled hair, combining their mutually enhancing details in making their young owner the79 target of feminine admiration. Cousins are by no means denied the privileges of marital union, and as there are all kinds of cousins, and the privilege is less and less questionable according to the numerical distance between them, it became a matter of preliminary importance for Leacraft to find out what kind of a cousin Brig Barry was to Sally Garrett.

In pondering sadly over this uncertainty his well formed plans, so agreeably outlined during his toilet, fell into disorder, and, as it were, evaporated. His agony of heart was not relieved when he observed the cruel object of his misgivings. Sally was placed at his side at the dinner table; opposite them sat Mr. Barry and Ned Garrett, and the ends of the table commodiously accommodated Mr. and Mrs. Garrett. Sally was radiant; she was well dressed, and—Leacraft’s eyes first sought its place—the aigrette was gone, and he noticed, acutely conscious of all telltale signals of interference by others with his own designs, a solitaire diamond ring on her right hand. His discomfiture was complete. It was a sad discovery, and Sally, gleaming with a light of happiness it was not his good luck to dispense, relentlessly added to his distress by showering the loathed Brig Barry with glances of commendation and approval.

But when could this engagement—he shuddered at the word—have been made? Leacraft, solicitous80 from the moment he entered the Baltimore house in the afternoon, had scanned that same hand with a jealous scrutiny, about two hours before, and it was guiltless of rings—quite free—he could have sworn to that. Was it possible that he had witnessed the closing rites of their pre-conjugal union from the top of the stairway? It was most likely. For a moment the unhappy man felt a swinging sensation, a kind of revolting nausea that put an actual pain in his heart, and a sudden impulse almost straightened him upon his legs, and would have sent him flying from the house, seized him, which only an indomitable Spartan furor of resistance, in his English soul, could have conquered.

The next instant he, too, was smiling, even observing with pleasant alacrity that when Brig Barry raised his wine glass to his lips, his eyes fell invitingly upon Sally, and that flattered fairy responded by sipping from her own, not, indeed, that such telegraphy of signals was obvious or unmannerly; no! it required the jealous eyes of an irritable rival to have seen it at all. It certainly was a cruel ordeal. It certainly taxed Leacraft’s self-possession. It was so fathomless and unexpected. Not a word from Ned about it, and Sally had always before appeared austerely impartial. Perhaps it was a sudden fancy, an illusion, hopeless on her part, because she could never marry her own cousin. The Englishman rummaged painfully in81 his stock of conservative teachings to prove conclusively that so abhorrent a social impropriety could never be permitted. But there was the ring! Well, a ring; what of it? A common gift; nothing more. It was madness for him to jump at conclusions so recklessly. Two cousins admiring each other—yes, loving each other, in a beautiful, domestic family way—and separated for a long time, were naturally rejoicing in reunion. Stupid to attribute so much as he had done, under so slight provocation, to their mutual affection, the affection, doubtless, of a brother and sister; keener indeed, as why not?

Ruminating thus propitiously, and only half conscious that he was going through the formalities of a course dinner, and was but poorly assisting the conversation, which consciously he thought had not yet developed into any consecutive line of talk, he suddenly seemed to come back to his senses, as these words proceeded with celerous distinctness from the lips of the older Garrett:

“A despatch was received in the office this afternoon, about an hour ago, from Colon, which startled us a good deal. Three earthquake shocks have been felt in Colon, and an enormous tidal wave swept over Limon Bay, in the direction of Mindi. There was loss of life at Colon. The coast towards the embouchure of the Chagres river has sunk sensibly, and a rumor prevailed at Colon, at the time the82 despatch was sent, that the walls of the great Culebra Cut had collapsed. This is bad news, if it is true, bad news for the President, bad news for the country. So enormous a disaster will be known at once, if it to be known at all. The fact that no press accounts have been given out makes me hope that our despatch is a mistake, a canard, perhaps.”

“Oh! the poor President!” exclaimed the sympathetic Sally; “he will need his courage now. It can’t be so horrible. They surely can’t mean, papa, that the canal is destroyed. That would be too shameful.”

“The operations of Nature,” said Ned Garrett, “are not generally susceptible to shame. Nature is about the most shameless thing on the face of the earth,” and they all smiled at the thought.

“Yes,” said Mr. Barry—and Leacraft watched him with eager eyes, and listened with critical ears—“Nature has a happy way of discriminating between shame and compassion. She tries to make up for her cruelties by some new blessing, but she never tells anybody that her cruelties ever made her blush. If this news is a portent of worse; if the canal should be destroyed, if the isthmus is invaded by the oceans, a canal without locks will be given to us free of charge.”

“And we have spent one hundred and thirty million dollars already. As a financial proposition, it is hard to see why we have not paid as much for83 one as for the other,” dryly commented Mr. Garrett. Leacraft felt it incumbent upon him to say something, and his fatal over-valuation of seriousness allured his tongue into a statement statistical and scientific, something which might impress Sally—but which only afflicted that young degenerate person with an immoderate preference for the way her cousin, Brig Barry, might have said the same thing.

“I am rather curiously reminded,” began Leacraft, “of a lecture which I heard in Washington last April, in which the lecturer, Mr. Binn, ventured to offer a very alarming prediction as to the instability of the Central American zone, and especially the portions of it embraced in the isthmus. He was rebuked at the time in open meeting by a Senator, but if your information turns out to be correct, perhaps he is about to receive a stunning corroboration. It would be of some psychological interest to know whether Mr. Binn in that case preferred his own reputation to his country’s welfare.”

“I heard of Binn’s talk,” remarked Brig Barry. “I was near the Mexican line, and we had had a brush with some greasers which were kicking at Uncle Sam’s tariff. A Washington paper turned up in camp, and there was Binn’s Jeremiad. I think the paper had it ‘Science Butting In,’” and, to Leacraft’s surprise, Sally laughed.

84

But a moment later she turned to Leacraft with unaffected interest, and said, “But, Mr. Leacraft, do you think Mr. Binn knew?” and her voice was plaintive and concerned.

“It is reserved for astronomy,” said Mr. Garrett, “to have prospective knowledge, to know the future exactly, with a calendar in one hand, and a watch in the other. I think it is not an imputation on the credibility of science to say that in other departments its knowledge of the future is speculative.”

“Mr. Binn,” began Leacraft, “was not at all didactic, as regards time, but he was emphatic in the general scope of his predictions. He regarded the Isthmus and the Central American area as belonging in their geological habits to the West Indies, and he had a very poor opinion of the fidelity of the latter to implied obligations. He regarded it as capricious and wayward, unsubstantial in its composition, and a bit fickle in its attachments.” It was almost impossible not to think that the speaker was not putting a little bit of something more than science in his words. He continued: “His views also involved a curious reference to a rather topsy turvy theory that the earth was pear-shaped, and that the belt of earthquakes and crustal disorders along the borders of the Pacific resulted from this hypothetically crooked figure of the earth.”

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Brig Barry was listening with intense attention, and a whimsical glimmer of a smile turned the ends of his lips, while his eyes very gravely, with a slight contraction of their eyelids, watched Leacraft, with half inquisitorial perplexity.

“I think,” he broke in, “that the West Indies will manage to take care of themselves. At least, present indications go to prove, that instead of disappearing, they are on their way to bigger things. Commander Beecham, who has just come from the Isle of Pines, told me yesterday, that the island was rising, that in a short time it might become part of Cuba. The question might then be asked, as we own the Isle of Pines, whether we had not annexed Cuba.”

“I have heard of the Isle of Pines,” said Mrs. Garrett, “but hardly understand what it is. Perhaps a little enlightenment on the subject would not be unwelcome to the rest of you.”

“Do, Brig,” pleaded Sally, “in the role of instructor you may be as successful in geography as in other subjects,” and Leacraft flushed and sat back hard, to resist the harsh blow of this subtle reminder of his worst suspicions.

Mr. Barry looked around, as if to secure the suffrages of the company, and found every eye fixed upon him in expectation. It was his turn to impress Sally. He last looked at her, and as he did, he laughingly began: “I shall have no compunctions86 in being a trifle the schoolmaster. The Isle of Pines, Mrs. Garrett, lies in a deep bight or bay near the south coast of the western part of Cuba. There are some six hundred and thirty thousand acres in it, and it is but ninety-nine square miles less in extent than our little State of Rhode Island. This island bears a sort of filial relation to Cuba. It is part of the general chain of the insular mainlands of the Antilles. It is not a coral key or a mangrove swamp. It forms a plateau from fifty to one hundred feet above sea level, broken by ridges of hills or cliffs that start out over its surface like the bones on the back of a thin cow.” Sally’s deferential attention to Mr. Barry’s learning was here interrupted by a very audible titter.

“I beg to remonstrate against any levity in my class, and I think, Miss Garrett, you owe me an apology for attempting to disturb my recital.” This mock rebuke completed Sally’s disorder. Her eyes, wet with tears of merriment, looked at Brig Barry, who had assumed himself the amusing expression of offended dignity, and she murmured, “Excuse me, sir,” with such a delicious mockery of piteous appeal that her father laughed aloud, but Leacraft maintained his stern reserve, with eyes uplifted from the face of his rival.

“Small as this island is, it offers room for two mountain ridges at its northern end, which reach the respectable elevation of fifteen hundred feet,87 and are composed of limestones. There are other ridges in the island, lower and less steep. The whole island is surrounded by swamps, except towards the south, where it is rocky. Commander Beecham says that in the last month strange uplifts have been noticed, almost unaccompanied by any serious seismic—this last word, Miss Garrett, may affect you unpleasantly; it means earthquake,—disturbance and shoals and reefs are now bristling out of the sea, like the teeth on a comb. And another singular circumstance can be mentioned. The island abounds in warm springs, curative—for your benefit, Miss Garrett, I may say that the word means healing—for rheumatism and throat affections, and these springs are sinking; the water seems to recede within the recesses of the earth, while in other cases the subterranean channels have either crushed together, or have become filled up; the springs are simply not there; they have vanished; the Commander has made observations on the coast lines, and it seemed to him that they were all rising. The Cuban coast is rising, too. He came through Havana, and the shipways in the harbor have become so shallow that there was a gloomy prospect that the city would be cut off from the sea. I only heard all this strange news an hour ago, and I fear the excitement caused by meeting Miss Garrett is to be held responsible for my forgetting to mention it before.”

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The allusion was noticed by only Leacraft; the next voice was that of Mr. Garrett, whose face had darkened with apprehension. “Extraordinary! It may be that our despatch is correct. It may be that there is a sort of see-saw here, that as the West Indies rise, the Central American coast sinks. But why not a whisper of such occurrences in the papers?”

“The see-saw fancy,” said Leacraft, now thoroughly aroused, and forgetting his immediate disappointment in the face of a formidable physical phenomenon, “was Mr. Binn’s. He gave me the feeling that he thought that, like an inflated surface, where the higher elevation of one part meant the lowering of another part, so the access of height in the West Indies meant the loss of height in the isthmus. And the provocation to any change would be earthquakes.”

“As to the papers not publishing anything,” explained Barry, “there are no newspaper correspondents in the Isle of Pines, and I recall now that Beecham told me that the authorities at Havana were so frightened over the reports of the harbor masters, that that they had prohibited their circulation. The thing may prove grave enough.”

“Let us hope,” said Ned Garrett, “that such rumors do not get abroad before to-morrow. They are only half-proven assertions, based upon some accidental and momentary circumstance. In89 a few days the Isle of Pines may be the same as it was, with the salt springs thrown in, and the harbor of Havana back again to its old position without so much as a jolt. The sea serpent is now advancing towards our shores at the summer resorts, why not a few nightmares from the tropics? A truce to ghosts. Let us drink to the President and the Canal.” The glasses were raised, their lips, before they touched the sparkling lymphs, offering, as if in silent prayer, to the consecration of the beaded wine, unuttered hopes for the country’s great head, and its great enterprise, had but felt the amber current flowing from the engraved chalices, musical with the tinkling of bits of ice, when,—a sharp cry of voices, a babel of tumultuous and precipitated outcries smote upon their ears, entering the open windows like an execrable assault. It was the shouting, thrilling with an unusual impetus of omen, of the newsboys, as if they had forgotten their mercantile relations to the news, which, whether of joy or grief, they commonly announce in the shrill yells of indifference and gloating expectation. Now their multitudinous voices mingled in a monstrous hoarseness, as if constrained by a personal and immediate sorrow and horror. Even ejaculations from men in the streets buying the papers from the hawkers, entered the room, and brought pallor to the cheeks of the mute company. Ned Garrett pushed back90 his chair and sprang to the door, followed by Brig Barry, and the rest stayed, immobile, like a stricken throng, waiting the next minute for an impending immolation.

Scarcely thirty seconds had elapsed when the two men came back with the papers of the street, one having the Baltimore Times, the other holding in his hands the Southern Herald. The faces of both men were pale, and on the cheeks of Ned Garrett shone a trace of tears. Barry was the first to enter the room, and as Mr. Garrett, now standing at the head of the table, his body half turned towards the door, his face suffused with unchecked emotion—as Mr. Garrett said, “Well, what is it?” he faltered, and dropping the paper to his side, he faced the convulsed merchant, and was silent. It was Ned Garrett who cried out, “The Isthmus is crumbling to pieces and the Canal is doomed.”

The order of events as we hear any sudden stroke of affliction, as we suddenly confront the inevitable bereavement, as we feel the sharp thrust of calamity penetrate our hearts, varies with temperaments and sex; but for the most part it reflects the order of events under physical attack, the stunned senses, and the reaction. It is in the reaction that the difference among men most visibly appears. Slowly Mrs. Garrett arose and left the room, and Sally, after a pause, during which she had91 stolen to the side of Brig Barry, and lifted the paper from his side, where it had fallen in his unnerved hands, followed her.

The four men were left behind, and of them only Leacraft was seated. It was Leacraft who first spoke: “This is awful, but the Nation is far greater than any misfortune that can befall it.” The other three turned to him with one accord, as if saved from their own wretchedness, and moved in his direction as if to embrace him. It was the right word. It brought relief, and to one at least as he turned his back to the speaker it brought tears. Mr. Garrett the elder looked intensely at Leacraft, his eyes almost glittering with the sudden joy of consolation, and said, “Thank you, Mr. Leacraft, for that true word. It is the one we need. You are an Englishman, and your confidence in us is part of your own Anglo-Saxon strength, and part of your best knowledge that we are nourished by the same blood. Let us sit down, and you, Brig,” (Ned Garret’s back was still turned to them) “read the papers to us. The first reports may be much exaggerated.”

Some servants had by this time collected in the room at the side of the butler’s pantry and waited there irresolute. Mrs. Garrett and Sally also softly returned, and took their places at the table; with them, as with Ned Garrett, the thought of the President’s misery unnerved them. Barry had spread92 the paper before him. The dark head lines swept across the sheet in ominous relief. They read:

THE NATION’S LOSS.
EARTHQUAKES AND LAND SUBSIDENCE ENGULF
THE ISTHMUS AND THE CANAL.
The Awful Cataclysm of Nature.
THE PRESIDENT DEEPLY AFFECTED.
THE MOST TERRIBLE CATASTROPHE IN MODERN TIMES.

News from Aspinwall of the most appalling character has been received in Washington, and though an initial effort to conceal or suppress the despatches was made, wiser councils prevailed and the country will know the worst. America must now vindicate her courage and maintain the reputation she justly holds among the nations of the world for self-reliance and self-control.

A long telegram received at the executive mansion in Washington to-day was given to the country by the orders of the President, after unavailing remonstrances from the members of the cabinet, who wanted the news withheld until confirmatory despatches were received. It is believed that these were received, and that the President ordered the distribution of the news. In a word it announces the destruction of the Canal, and the submergence of the Canal zone, through a series of progressive changes in the earth’s surface at that section, accompanied93 by severe earthquake phenomena. The confluent waters of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans will mingle over the buried structures of the Canal, and one hundred and fifty millions of dollars, representing the labor of three years, and nearly fifty thousand men, with an enormous accumulation of material, will have been spent in vain. The Nation’s credit remains unimpeached and unimpeachable, but the moral effects of this stupendous calamity can scarcely be over-estimated.

THE STORY IN DETAIL.

A series of quickly succeeding earthquakes shook the City of Panama on the evening of May 27th. They were slight in character, though distinguished by peculiar rotatory effects, turning natural objects half way round, and producing curious effects upon pedestrians who became dizzy under their influence. These seemed to have passed inland and to have accumulated in one severe shock at Miraflores, just as a number of waves in water, chasing each other, may combine to form a resultant wave higher than its components, and generally, if the confluence takes place in the right phase, of a height which is the sum of the heights of the smaller elements.

At any rate, a most violent disturbance occurred at the latter place, throwing down houses, and opening hillsides, which was followed by an alarming sinking of the ground. The railroad track disappeared, part of the canal walls were swallowed up,94 an immense influx of water from La Boca poured in, and the former site of the village became a lake-like expanse. No further shocks were felt, although doubtless considerable dislocation farther west had taken place, and the locks on the Canal beyond the Culebra Cut, in the direction of Gamboa, San Pablo, and Tavernilla were perhaps impaired. As if the hidden energies of the earth had become reinforced, and the subterranean fires had renewed their devastating fury, on the morning of the 28th a sharp upheaval of the ground at Tavernilla, in the old delta plane of the Chagres river, took place, almost immediately succeeded by as rapid a collapse and depression. This alarming operation of the ground was repeated, upon a titanic scale in the submerged delta plane between Pena Blanca and Gatun. It was reported that at first small monticules of rock, mud, and sand, appeared in the vicinity of Agua Clara, but these proved to be ephemeral elevations, subsiding foot by foot, until with one monstrous convulsion the whole ridge of hills between Limon Bay, to the west on the Canal line, and Barrage at the old French dam, slipped bodily into the sea, with unutterable sounds, the rocks as it were exploding with immeasurable violence. The discharge of the mountain mass into the oceanic depths caused terrific tidal waves to rush outward, and north and south, in colossal walls of water. One of these swept upon the panic-stricken inhabitants of Colon,95 its solid phalanx suddenly approaching from the sea, and in conjunction with earthquakes that had emptied the houses of the horrified occupants, bringing them all to the verge of madness, from sheer fear. The skies, as if engaged in some hideous conspiracy of destruction, with the moving earth, suddenly darkened. Deluges of water poured from the ebony and swollen clouds, lightning in incessant lines of quivering brilliancy shot from their lurid depths, and thunders intensified by a thousand reverberations, shook the recesses of the trembling hills.

It was not surprising that the spectators of these monstrous happenings, with their earth vanishing beneath their feet, the overcharged skies emptying the arsenals of their electric fires upon them, and the irresistible floods of the ocean, rising like avengers to overwhelm them, should have cast reason to the winds, and dumb with amazement, and insane almost with horror, should have sunk upon their knees, and waited for the engulfment, which was to them part of this preternatural ending of the world.

Few were strong enough to resist the frightful strain, and the woods and hills near Colon were filled with men and women in all states of frenzy. Some with cowering limbs and bowed heads awaited the summons of death or the call of Judgment, while others, lost alike to reason and96 moderation, nakedly execrated Heaven, or, stark mad, plunged weapons of defence into the bodies of prostrate women.

A few engineers at Colon had hastily constructed a camp on the higher hills towards the north, in which they were imitated by engineers at other points. These had communicated with the equipment at Colon, and it was from the latter city, which had at last accounts suffered little else than shocks of varying violence, but not destructive, that the first news had been sent.

LATER ADVICES.

From Allia Juela at an old dam station to the north of Gamboa, in the hills, and on the water tributaries of the Chagres, news has been just received that the pertubations continue, and that the areas about Aspinwall (Colon) are becoming progressively invaded by the sudden sinking movements, and the worst fears are entertained for the permanence of all sections of the Canal. A telegram received from Graytown, Nicaragua, announces the awakening of the volcanoes of Costa Rica, especially Poas and Irazu; steam and smoke are arising from other previously dormant peaks, and ashes have fallen in large amounts in the streets of Greytown. In an interview with Mr. F. C. Nicholas, the well known industrial prospector of Central America, that authority says the zone of possible disturbance may extend quite far, north and south of the Canal strip,97 though in his opinion the more disastrous results may be expected in the mountainous and volcanic chains along the old proposed route of the Nicaragua inter-oceanic canal. He has himself felt the tremors of the earth there and here ten or more years ago his ear caught, so slight however that it might have been only fancy, the faint rumbling of the mountains as if in travail, which at the time was interpreted by the guides as a premonition of storm. Mr. Nicholas added at the close of his interview that “when I left Colon after my visit to Nicaragua common report had it that in Nicaragua there was a valley of fire surrounded with blazing volcanoes, and that I had seen it—a good example of Spanish-American exaggeration. It may indeed now happen, that this fanciful picture might, in even a more extravagant and dreadful way, be realized, and the long pent up forces of the earth, slumbering through ages, become reawakened, with the most disastrous consequences to the whole Central American domain, through a contagious outbreak of volcanic forces and terrestrial subsidences.”

Barry paused, and his eye travelled down the page of the paper. He stopped and exclaimed: “They’ve got wind of the things Beecham told me about. Listen. ‘The Isle of Pines is rising, and in the opinion of local authorities, the shoals at low water between it and Cuba will afford an almost unbroken transit to the greater island. The Windward98 Passage between Cuba and Hayti has been invaded by new reefs, and the Monas Passage between San Domingo and Porto Rico is also reported by sailing vessels recently arriving at Havana, to present unusual and uncharted features, as if the floor of the ocean was also there undergoing elevation.

“‘These marvellous modifications of the earth’s surface seemed connected with renewed activity in the volcanic islands of the Lesser Antilles. Mt. Pelee is again reported to be in eruption on the island of Martinique, while La Soufriere, on St. Vincent, is in active eruption, and Dominica, Santa Lucia and the Barbados have been visited by unprecedented tides, which have been regarded as evidence of the subsidence of the foundations of the islands themselves.

“‘We stand aghast before these incomprehensible phenomena; our minds recoil before the awful powers of the natural world; we stumble in darkness at the meaning of this inscrutable visitation; truly, we may recall the words of the psalmists: Then the channels of the waters were seen, and the foundations of the world were discovered at thy rebuke, O Lord, at the blast of the breath of Thy nostrils.’”

Barry ceased reading. He had read all the paper contained. He turned mechanically to the sheet Ned Garrett had laid on the table, and glanced over99 it, remarking—“it is the same”—and then there was complete silence. It was Leacraft again who helped to restore their composure; “I think,” he said, “that in any event the water connexion between the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans is assured. Suppose the canal structure, as it was supposed to be finally at its completion, is all swept away or rendered impossible, an obviously easier access from one ocean to the other is created. If a complete change in the relations of land to water surfaces is now in progress, if Mr. Binn’s disagreeable predictions are now about to be realized, a good many remarkable and not altogether regrettable conditions may supervene. The water-way may become a veritable strait, providing easy, unbroken and capacious connexions between the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific ocean—the islands of the West Indies may slowly converge into one land surface, and a new continent invite populations and industries, which the wild, slothful or decadent peoples of Central America, with their hot, fever laden and deleterious climates, could not encourage or support. We may be entering upon a new chapter in the history of the world, and in the history of nations. Who can tell upon what strange threshold we are standing? Let us wait and see. Man is subordinate to and the victim of circumstances. Circumstance also gives him his opportunities. What wonders may not the hand of God work in100 this marvellous reconstruction of land and water? And if two hundred millions of dollars, as representing the final cost of the Canal, seems to have been swallowed up, what of it? A nation whose annual appropriations—as I only read yesterday—are on the scale of six hundred millions a year, should regard with comparative complacence a loss of one-third of that amount, when it arises from a permanent and desirable change in physical, perhaps human, conditions.”

As Leacraft was speaking, the little group of his auditors remained motionless, with—it did not escape Leacraft’s jealous notice—Sally and Brig at its centre, in a sort of mutually consoling contact, and the servants a little behind, in a scrutinizing attitude, anxious through a sense of sympathy with the evident distress of the household.

Mr. Garrett spoke, and Leacraft rose to his feet. “We have indeed suffered a harsh blow, but it has its after thoughts of alleviating hope, and you have shown us that our alarm is more emotional than substantial. The country has been fed upon the proud anticipations of the accomplishment of this Canal. It has become a political question. It has colored the utterances of our public men. It has been the dream of the President, as the crowning work of a pre-eminent list of services to the nation. His energy has pushed it to the verge of completion, and in its prosecution the Nation and the101 President have become united in positive endorsement. It may all be right yet. Let us hope and pray so.”

Flushed with real feeling, Mr. Garrett shook the hand of Leacraft, and in a sort of review, the rest imitated his example, and left the room, leaving Ned and Leacraft behind.

It was then that Leacraft turned to Ned Garrett and said: “I thought I saw an engagement ring on the hand of your sister.” The statement was a question. Ned Garrett looked at his friend with singular intensity of interest and sympathy. He realized the anguish of the man who, loving his sister beyond all earthly price, forgot a country’s peril in the eagerness of his hope that perhaps his heart-breaking fears were unjustified. The two men were standing. Ned Garrett took Leacraft’s hand and placed his other hand upon his shoulder, and his earnest face uttered its inviolable commiseration: “Yes, Burney; Sally is engaged to Mr. Barry.” They turned and left the room.

That night it was not the convulsions of nature breaking down the barriers of two words, and bringing into action new forces and new vicissitudes among the peoples of the earth, that marred the sleep of the restless Englishman. No; it was the face of Sally Garrett smiling into the bending face of Brig Barry, and touching his lips.

The Garrett party reached Gettysburg at mid-day, May 30th, 1909, having passed through, in the train from Baltimore, the delightfully rural scenes of western Maryland and southern Pennsylvania. Recent rains had swelled the brooks and expanded the ponds. The wide undulations of hills and vales were radiant in verdure, responding with the alacrity of new vegetation to the encouragement of the skies, that now in a broad arch of fleckless blue, seemed to bend over them in pride and emulation. A thousand pictures of loveliness, of homely domestic bliss, of agricultural plenty, of bucolic thrift and retirement, met their eyes, and Leacraft himself found a solace to his grieved soul in resting his eyes upon spots of soft and uninjured beauty, wherein nature and the gentle craft of pastoral life103 combined their artless charms to make the landscape serene and inviting to the eye.

It was almost with regret that they left the train at Gettysburg. The noise or motion of the cars, and the uninterrupted succession of pleasant views from their windows had prevented conversation, in which none of them, from preoccupation, or from anxiety, from, in one person at least, sadness, or from, in this case to be exact, two persons, extreme happiness, cared to enter. And when Gettysburg was itself finally encountered, they found it in the last spasms of inordinate repletion. The most exorbitant greed of guide and hackman, guide-book man, publican and popcorn or peanut vendor, was abashed before a popular consumption that threatened to drive them into a confession of impotency. Everything that had cubic capacity, whether it moved or stood still, whether it was a vehicle or a house, was aching under the intolerable pressure of its human contents. Everywhere clouds of flags decorated the air. The houses were beribboned and beflagged, and innumerable lines crossing the streets in a web of suspensory confusion, carried pennants and pictures to the last limits of their carrying capacity, and to the bewilderment unutterable and admiration unrepressed of the crowds beneath them. These crowds had become almost stagnant because of the crowds in front of them, and these in turn by reason of other104 crowds in front of them, until the successional torpor seemed to reach out of sight, and presumably ended in some greater peripheral crowd, which, having attained its appointed place by choice or selection, refused to budge. To make their way, was almost impossible to the visitors, whether they besought the services of a driver, or tried the painful expedient of threading the human mass on foot. In this extremity they simply remained where they were at first arriving, hoping either the slow motion of the democratic assemblage would afford them some sort of escape, or at some critical moment the vast throng would resolve itself into dispersion, and under the influence of direction or force, get itself better adjusted to the requirements of its individuals.

Now, it was understood by all the published programmes of that day’s exercises that the address of the President was to be delivered at that historic spot known as the High Water Mark, which marks the uprushing tide, the foaming crest and insurmountable limit of the Rebellion, which thereafter receded in wavering surges to the south. In the great reservation, devoted as a monument to the battle which saved the Union, this spot is central, and the acres stretched about it would accommodate an army. It was quite inexplicable why this annoying interference and congestion prevailed. It turned out to be a military precaution. The105 President was to be installed safely at the speaker’s stand, escorted by veterans of the north and south, before the people should be permitted to assemble around him, and a cordon of military enclosed the little village, keeping confined within it the straining and impatient visitors.

The village of Gettysburg, which was used in the great battle as a hospital, and which entirely escaped injury in the three days’ conflict, was more than a mile away from the place chosen for the ceremonies of the day. When the dam was removed it was seen there would be a dangerous stampede for position. Music, too, swept exhilaratingly over the throngs from the distant scene of the festivities, and its martial notes awakened to desperation the disappointed and vexed multitude. The large numbers twisted and irksomely tied up within the narrow streets, and turbulently mixed up on the little square of the village, groaned aloud.

Voices suddenly rose high in altercation and abuse. A farmer whose rickety wagon, laden with his sons and daughters, had got packed between a curb and a particularly dense fragment of the crowd, made up of vituperative young men, and was in almost certain danger of being upset, was engaged in a lusty expostulation not unassisted by the quick and sharp lashes of his whip, over the heads of the dodging group. The latter, not averse106 to some retaliatory measures that might serve the purpose of freeing their general resentment at their imprisonment, attacked the irate proprietor of the wagon and pushed his shivering vehicle over, spilling its screaming and swearing occupants upon the heads of the bystanders, who were utterly unable to escape, and added their din to the commotion.

This diversion, attended with laughter, shouts and cries of pain, had nearly subsided, when a new and more alarming disorder arose in the neighborhood of the Garrett party, who had betaken themselves to the porch of one of the souvenir shops. A wandering and aimless dog, suffering from kicks and repulses, had turned on some of its persecutors, and, yelping and snapping with inflamed and frightened eyes, had suddenly been diagnosed, by an inconsiderate observer, as “mad.” This information, as usually, proclaimed in a loud, denunciatory tone, raised in a second an indescribable hubbub. Room to run from the bewildered canine was not to be found, and the only thing to do for those in the vicinity, was to squeeze more violently against their companions, leaving a slender and irregular space in which the dog gyrated, biting at friend and foe alike. The undulous area of movement thus formed swayed to and fro, with the distracted struggles of the dog, and soon swung violently towards the Garretts, who became rudely107 jolted and pressed by frantic men and women, in whose legs apprehension of the dog’s teeth seemed to have produced extraordinary motions, for they shuffled and kicked and scrambled in a way very undignified and ridiculous. The upshot of it was to drive a frenzied pack of people towards the souvenir shop, in the hope of entering the shop, and evading the wretched canine somewhere beneath their skirts and trousers—an absurd design, as the shop itself was solid with condensed humanity.

Brig Barry saw the danger, and quickly hustling Sally and Mrs. Garrett between the men of his party, told all to stand firmly, after knitting their arms within each other, forming an elastic and impenetrable wall. As it was, the colliding tides around them sent them on an unexpected orbit of translation, and a few minutes later they found themselves pushed towards the trolley tracks, not far from the dishevelled and malign looking local hotel, but in a less exposed and stormy quarter.

And now a marvellous change took place. The barriers were down; the rolled up soldiers opened the avenues of approach; the President, members of his Cabinet, the Commissioners of the Reservation, and the veterans of the North and the South, were in place, and the delayed populace, released from its confinement, with instantaneous expansion, hurried over the roads and fields to the station of the High Water Mark on Cemetery Ridge. It was108 a picturesque spectacle. When the condensation was removed, it became apparent in how much splendor the girls and women of the country and the near and distant towns had been arrayed. They came from Harrisburg, from Emittsburg, along the fatal road that Longstreet’s rangers followed, from Taneytown, from Hagerstown, where Lee’s army had its rendezvous before the battle of Seminary Ridge; from Chambersburg, which Ewell had dragooned; from Wrightsville, where Early was balked by the burning of the Susquehanna Bridge, on the 29th of June; from Newville, from Hanover, from Fairfield, the belles and beaux had gathered, and with them no indifferent number of their fathers and mothers. They wore their best ginghams, and calicoes, and silks; the ancient trouseaus, refitted and remade, still imparted the aspect of richness to their wearers, who, ensconced beside their furrowed and tanned husbands, also refurbished, so to speak, with store clothes and a rainbow neck-tie, felt the novelty of life return, and something of the freshness of the glad morning of existence. The girls were most happy and the boys voluble and attentive. The caravan of vehicles would have tasked the vocabulary of Tattersalls, though it was not altogether so remarkable for the variety of its contents as the indefinite suggestion of varied ages in its parts. And here and there some time-worn carryall creaking under the infliction of an unusual109 load, and drawn by some Rosinante, whose feeble gait and frequent halts betokened a sad contemporaneity with the vehicle itself, offered a pathetic note in the hurrying splendor of the congregated regalia of the barn and stable and garage.

The Garretts, once extricated from their embarrassed position, armed with passports, one in the hands of Brig Barry, and a special card in the possession of Mr. Garrett, as guest of the Chamber of Commerce of Baltimore, had little difficulty in securing the essential indulgences for a delightful day. In a three-seated coach wagon, with a splendid team of horses, they bowled along as far as the beginning of Hancock avenue, which leads from the National Cemetery to the Round Tops. Here they alighted and surveyed the wondrous scene. It was resplendent. A sun burning with the soft brilliancy of June bathed the grand distances towards the Blue Hills in light, while the Blue Hills themselves receded with artistic forbearance behind an atmosphere that veiled them in an evanescent purple and yet seemed to magnify their height. The slopes of Cemetery Ridge were covered by people, and the lower levels where the Codori farm buildings stood; the Peach Orchard, where Sickles and Longstreet met for the mastery; the grain field beyond, over whose long stretches Pickett’s charge was made, were filled with moving groups. The distant woods, the nearer groves, the110 grassy fields, Little and Big Round Top, all were transfigured in the golden blaze, and the innumerable monuments that gave the park-like Ridge a sort of scenic artifice, seemed to become accordant, in the vastness of the panorama, with its natural and simple features. The farm lands, the white houses, dotting fields, or emerging with human interest from lines of shadowing trees, the peace of the distant perspective, accorded a welcome contrast to the foreground of the picture, immersed in the waves of a popular assembly.

Automobiles flying like clouds rushed along the far away roads, bicycles in undulating and streaming lines, grew large with rapid approach; the gathering spots of people merged together and became irregular squares, the squares united and became tracts, and the tracts, by an incessant accretion, coincided along their edges until Cemetery Ridge, the slopes towards Little Round Top and the field below the “angle,” where Cushing and Armistead died, were unbrokenly covered with the vast congregation, pulsating ceaselessly by an interior agitation everywhere.

The heterogeneous assortment of conveyances were halted near the National Cemetery, and the people made their way to the enclosure, where the President was to address them, along the triumphal monument-enfiladed boulevard of Hancock avenue.

111

The Garrett party had noticed the earnestness and apparent preoccupation of the people. The news of the previous night had spread its sinister announcements through the papers of the country, carried to every village on the myriad fingered currents of the telegraph. It had left its impress in the serious, sombre and sometimes dully frowned faces of the men. “I feel sorry for the President,” said Sally. “The Canal seemed almost himself, and the people thought of it and him together. What will he do?”

“The President,” answered Ned Garrett, “will not flinch. Ever since he went down to the Isthmus in 1906, and made the dirt fly, he has watched the Canal with his whole heart in it. He knew what it meant for the country, for the world, and now”—the speaker hesitated—“he will know what to say and do. How I believe in that man!”

“But I can’t see,” continued Brig Barry, “that the idea of the Canal is lost. Let us suppose there is a shifting and readjustment down there. The two oceans are left behind, not much different, and if the isthmus breaks down, splits up, and goes to thunder, there’s water enough to cover the remains, and we have the Canal anyway.”

“But it isn’t our Canal any more,” ejaculated Sally. “It seems,” said Mr. Garrett, “as if our grief had been premature. There is enough to worry over in this frightful catastrophe, and its112 limits no one to-day can correctly estimate, but as Brig says, the Canal idea is saved, or at least it seems reasonable to believe that it may be. If Nature makes a bigger canal, if she changes the face of the earth enough, as Leacraft told us last night, to unite the oceans and make a strait, the commercial union of the western and eastern continents is secured on a larger scale. Perhaps our national pride must suffer some, but the fact remains, though, it would have saved our exchequer a handsome outlay, if nature, consulting our financial happiness, had done her work a little earlier.”

“If we’d only waited,” sighed Mrs. Garrett, ruefully.

They had reached the edges of the throngs who stood in the sun, engrossing every coigne of vantage, and an orderly, examining their tickets, conducted them through a narrow lane of envious gazers to a stand of seats to the south of the President’s rostrum. From this position their eyes fell directly upon the amazing outpouring of the people, an ocean of individuals, hopelessly cancelled from any chance to hear the President’s voice, yet extending outward in a solemn silence, and but furtively invaded by those busy concomitants of such public gatherings—button men and popcorn merchants. For the most part such annoyances were inordinately thrust aside, but scurrying over the most distant outposts of the mammoth audience,113 their eager shapes were seen, and inconstantly, borne inward by the breeze, the shrill invitation of their voices was heard.

Leacraft fixed his eyes upon the President, and he was near enough to him to note his expression. President Roosevelt sat squarely facing the people—now crushing in with an irresistible impulse from the distributed masses before him. He seemed serious, at moments almost solemnly so, at others he turned to his companions with alacrity, and his face even smiled at some allusion or whispered comment. Again his eyes wandered dreamily—Leacraft thought sadly—to his notes, and then he moved restlessly and leaned forward, and even half rose, eagerly scanning the expectant faces. A jumping up of half a dozen men at the rear of the platform, a signal of a waved handkerchief, followed, and the band, stationed somewhere behind the distinguished occupants of the platform, began the Star Spangled Banner. Everyone not already standing rose, heads even uncovered, and the spirited strains seized by the concourse, were flung back in a torrent of vocality, that sounded like the far and near thunder of the ocean’s surges. It was overwhelming. As if before the spirit of the Nation, the living and the dead; those whose discarnate beings might seem rushing in upon them from the viewless depths of space, summoned again to the fields of their endeavor by the marshall air,114 hats were doffed in all directions, until scarcely a covered head among the men remained, and many eyes streamed with irrepressible tears. The note of a requiem, the prouder challenge of defiance, the lofty questioning of Hope, the loving clasp of fraternal patriotism, the aspirations of a race, solving “in the foremost files of time” the problem of the world’s political creed, seemed blended together, in the avalanche of sound. And it was maintained to the end, even the verses of the national anthem were well remembered, and that trying and unattainable high note, like the scream of the eagle, which closes the lips of most singers in dubious apathy, was now sustained. The President sang lustily, and then he stopped, his head bowed; he might have been in prayer. It was noticed by all and it almost seemed as if the music quailed and sank before the mystery of a man’s outpoured petition to his God.

It was over. The music ceased, the frail voice of the chairman sounded its quavering invitation to prayer, and a clergyman arose and droned an invocation. The President was introduced and stood forward. He was well in view. One hand grasped the railing before him, the other clutched some separated papers, he looked well and the man’s vitality, his zealous unmitigated self exaction were realized. As he was seen, the tumult rose to a tremendous climax, cheers rolled forward and115 backward like the fluctuating billows of a sea; they receded to the outer margins far toward the Hagerstown road, where they vanished in murmurs, they crashed inward in volleying thunders, and the President stood erect, nerved to a steel-like rigidity; the air was swept with flags, the intoxication of the emotion increased, women palled before it, and men grew pale with the delirium of sudden enthusiasm. It seemed as if music alone could lead them back into the resignation of attention. It was a stupendous tribute. The man to whom it was given, had no reason for misgiving, no retributive judgments for his actions, to dread. Slowly, very slowly the cheering and cries died away, and then ensued a silence as remarkable and as impressive. The two contrasted states of the multitude might have been interpreted as a generous invitation to the man to speak, and as a judicial reservation of mind as to its own verdict when he had spoken. It almost seemed so, and the quick heart of the President might again have felt the palpitation of a doubt, whether he stood approved, or a critical people withdrew into the refuge of an impartial scrutiny. Leacraft felt all this, and he could not help also feeling a curious interest in the purely psychological enigma it presented.

The President was speaking; his voice reached Leacraft thin and sharp:

“My friends,” he began, “To-day we celebrate116 again the brave deaths of brave men, and the sacrifices they made for the maintenance of our common country. And we are gathered together on the battlefield which more than any other battlefield in that historic war, represented the culminating energies of both sides, the last vital contention for the mastery. These men left behind them the inestimable example of fortitude. And after the battle of Gettysburg it was more difficult for the southern man to continue the fight, in the face of disaster, with a depleted country behind him, and a foe flushed with victory, and drawing upon almost illimitable resources, than for his northern brother, for whom at last the tide of war seemed to have turned. We to-day need the lesson of this fortitude of the man in gray.

“My friends, a disaster has overtaken us,”—the crowd before the President seemed to compress itself in a further effort to get closer to him, “and it is our duty to remain firm and unfalteringly confident. I can scarcely doubt that you all have heard that nature has destroyed the Nation’s work. The face of the earth at the Isthmus of Panama is altered. Our work, our expenditures, the lives of thousands of hard working men have been sacrificed, and we stand aghast before a natural revolution unequaled in our day, unparalled perhaps in all the annals of history; something which in its wide devastating power, crushes our pride, and117 for a moment makes us cease to think, to plan, to build. I come to you this morning with strange tidings—tidings so unspeakably great in their influence upon our knowledge, that I almost hesitate to pronounce them, lest I might find myself the victim of some horrible and wicked hoax. The Isthmus of Panama, from Quibo Island in Montijo Bay, on the west, to the confines of the valley of the Atrato River at the edge of the Columbia, on the east, is deviously, here with a regular movement of depression, in another place with violent shock, sinking beneath the waters of the opposite encroaching oceans that swings backward and forward on either side in awful tidal deluges.

“The latest news confirms all the previous reports. Slowly, surely, even with hastening steps, the narrow neck of Panama, with its shallow shores, its long exposure of swamp and mud flats, with its crumbling hills, covered with tropical life will be engulfed, and the two continents of North and South America will return to a pristine condition of geographical autonomy. It is hard to believe. I cannot recount to you the wonderful pictures, terror-inspiring, and yet majestic with the majesty of Nature’s awful deeds, which have been sent to us. The loss of life has been considerable, but not proportionate to the stupendous agencies involved. After the first earthquake upheavals, the quickly succeeding disappearance of the solid ground furnished118 an adequate warning, and the populations along the canal-way at the villages and camps, and at Aspinwall and Panama, retreated to the hills, and with them the animal life, in a singular copartnership of fear. It is now regarded as certain, that we are about to see the last vestiges of the canal itself, the work of these last four years disappearing in the folding in and submergence of the rock strata.”

The President then told the story of the catastrophe as it had been narrated in the despatches received at the White House. He painted in graphic words the shaking down of the hills, the dislodged blankets slipping from the hill sides like a shawl from a shuddering woman, carrying with them the crashing trees, the jungle growth, the entwined tendrilous creepers and vines, while above the trees, swaying toward each other and then outward as if following the crests and troughs of hidden waves, above these tottering trees, the birds in screaming volleys rose and fell. The bared rocks showed rents, and tremendous explosions sent their shattered fragments into the air, while long weird groans issued from the ground as if the buried foundations of the hills were undergoing the tortures of mutilation. In other places it had been quite different. The ground slowly seemed to melt away, and with a sort of shuddering succession of chills the land disappears. How long, how much further this swallowing up of the land will go no119 one can tell. But it has seemed to those who have some knowledge of the region that it may embrace the S shaped Isthmus only, and that the tapering ends of the bulwarks of elevation in the Rocky Mountain chain on the north, and the Andes on the south will resist this degradation, that Costa Rica on the north and Columbia on the south will rudely define the north and south edges of the new avenue or gateway of unions between the oceans, that the new canal in this way, reconstructed by the titanic convulsions of nature, will become a wide and useful passage for commerce.

The President indulged the evident curiosity of his popular audience in a scientific discourse. His own interest was evident. He discussed earthquakes; he plunged into an essay on volcanoes; he spread luminously before the people the theories of the pear-shaped earth, the slipping of faults, the loading of the earth’s crust, the original formation of the deep creases in the earth’s surface, which now held its gathered waters. The President made a model expositor. He was clear and interesting. His style, his illustrative similes were attractive and deliberately helpful. It was almost amusing to note the contrasted effect of this improvised academic demonstration upon the people and upon the political sages of the platform. The former were attentive and absorbed. Their faces lit up with the quiet pleasure of intelligent appreciation, frequently120 at some pungent expression that pictured to them in stirring forcible photographic phrase the stifling struggle of land and water, the fierce unrest far down there in the tropics, which was unsettling the foundations of the earth, and slowly establishing a new order of things, pregnant with revolution in the day and fate of nations, carrying in its geological material insensate womb of meaning the dissolution of states, the upset and consternation of rulers, a menace to civilization, the ruthless unwavering threat to human accidents and institutions.

To all this the political magnates listened with bored indifference. They expected a party appeal, some appetizing bid for popular suffrage, a shot at the South, a resounding puff for the Republican candidates, a public acknowledgement of their personal industry in securing the re-election of himself, new projects of expenditure, and a programme of national expansion. They turned and twisted, and some deliberately slept or engaged in low conversations with an expressive irony of shrugs and smiles.

The President paused, his hands came together, and he leaned far forward, and a moment’s hesitancy marked the termination of his scientific periods. He continued, with sudden earnestness and vigour, with almost self-surrender to the impetus of his thought: “My friends, these are the facts,121 and no lamentations can change them. We must learn from the courage and devotion of the men who left this field defeated, to face this new predicament, not with resignation, simply, but with the constructive determination to seize this new turn in events and force it into our service, to make it only a more complete realization of our first designs. This is the triumph of Opportunity. Thus shall we wrest from the confusion of chance its empire of the fitting moment, and drive its scattered impulses into the straight, the narrow path of our strictest needs. The canal as a commercial necessity cannot be eclipsed or abandoned. The original project is replaced. Replaced by something greater, more permanent, more cosmopolitan. It becomes no longer a provincial fact, a national asset simply. It is a feature of the earth.

“What exactly has happened, how complete is the transformation no one exactly knows, but if the assistance of engineering is still to be invoked it can only be in a way of a help to nature. The facts remain.

“And now my friends a stranger possibility confronts us, nay it lifts up a sinister and awful, an ominous portent for the leading nations of the world. It seems likely that this physical alteration may mean a change in the climate of the older portion of the earth.”

Again the President launched into a scientific122 lecture and he was fortunate, as at first, as alertly careful, as broadly popular, as adroitly technical, without obscurity. It was well received. And its conclusion was altogether wonderful. Leacraft had good reason to listen with all his ears.

The President described the contrasted temperatures of similar latitudes in Europe and America, how England on the latitude of Labrador was warmer than New York which found its Adirondack mountains—chilled in the depth of winter to almost forty degrees below zero—on the same degree as southern France; itself the type and synonym of warmth. He made it clear how the thermal flood of warm waters upon the shores of Europe—heating the drifting airs above it till, laden with moisture, they too added their gifts of rain and warmth to Great Britain, and the shores of Scandinavia; how this Gulf Stream, a wayward impressionable wandering river pushing past Florida with a cubic capacity of seven hundred thousand cubic feet of water in half a second of time, and, held in its fluctuating course by the laws of gravity, how this marvellous oceanic flood, controlled the material conditions of England’s greatness; grasped, as it were, in the filmy fingers of its webbed and spreading tides, its wealth, its maritime supremacy, its intellectual distinction, its domestic thrift, and sunny sweetness. And then the President ended, and Leacraft bent forward, gripped the railing before123 him with sudden fierceness, a knell strangely appalling sounded in his ears, a portent widely distracting and unreasonable drove the color from his cheeks.

The President ended with these words: “The Gulf Stream whipped into violent activity by the south east trade winds beats impetuously upon the islands of the West Indies, washes the beaches of Central America, and whirls its spinning tides within the Gulf of Mexico, and then, repulsed by the continuous shore lines of North America, returns to Europe bearing its mantle of verdure to be thrown over the hills, the capes, the valleys the western edges and islands of the Old World. But now the barrier is gone. The Gulf Stream before the strong and rapacious winds is no longer turned aside by impossible walls of land but triumphantly sweeps into the Pacific, and with it vanishes the glory of England. For ourselves it means singular disaster though it may bring compensating changes. If England disappears as a world power we are robbed of a friend, we have lost a market. What words shall measure the moral meaning of the first, what revenues express the yearly increasing value of the latter. We stand on the threshold of a New Era.”

The termination of this remarkable address was its most momentous and unexpected announcement. As the President sat down, there was no applause,124 just a ripple of clapping hands as a half-hearted recognition of an invariable habit. The speech had been utterly robbed of political significance, despoiled of rhetorical or personal emphasis, it failed entirely as the usual thing in public oratory, and it left behind it an oppressive sense of impending changes. The President seemed depressed by his own vaticinations, and those around him, chilled into anxious forebodings, sat stiffly silent and unresponsive. The moment was saved from intolerable embarrassment by the band.

The leader stepped forward, waved his baton and the solemn strains of America—the transplanted hymn of England—rose plaintively, like a prayer; to Leacraft it sounded like encouragement, like sympathy. Someone began to sing—hats came off, the guests rose, and the multitude sang. If the Star Spangled Banner had been exultant and triumphant, thronged with the memories of achievement and victory—America throbbed with supplication, and underneath the supplication, the fervor of allegiance, sacrifice and love. The peculiar awkwardness of an unusual, an unique predicament, was removed. The speakers following the President made no allusion to the Canal, and all the marvellous happenings far away in Central America. They led the people’s thought back again to the soil they stood upon, to the memories of a glorious past, to the hopes of the future,125 the realization of the present tasks, the reiteration of the nation’s wealth and happiness, its strength under misfortune, its illimitable resources. They were successful. The pall of misgivings which the President had invoked was lifted. The band broke out again with reassuring liveliness, and good humour and holiday satisfaction revived.

Then came a procession through the Reservation to Big Round Top and back again on the lower ground past the Devil’s Den, and over the Emmetsburg road to Gettysburg, and in the clamorous excitement, the parade of uniforms, the brilliant atmosphere, congratulations and convivial indulgence, all the President’s words became clouded and unreal. And if the Isthmus was covered by water, if the Gulf Stream was deflected, if it meant blight for England, what of it? The United States would only become greater—its magnification would be unquestioned, boundless; the stars in their courses worked for them, and the mutations of the earth’s surface only brought to them unrivalled aptitudes for new chances, for new power.

This was said a good many times by a good many kinds of men, and the intangible something it suggested, by repetition, assumed the force of demonstration. There was a distinguishable forgetfulness of the disasters that had come, and a listless thought of those that were threatened. A few observant and reflecting minds brooded over the126 strange catastrophe, and yielded an attention to their implications. This attitude sprang from knowledge, and in the case of Leacraft from a personal interest in the singular sequence of events which the President portrayed, and which even the placidity of an Englishman’s confidence in his destiny failed to contemplate as injurious fiction. It was a thing to be reflected upon, at least, and added its sombre influence to deepen the gloom of Leacraft’s disappointment. But it also gradually developed for him a remedial efficacy, not simply as a spurious employment for his thoughts, but through a substantial relevancy to his emotional needs.

Leacraft’s mental inclinations carried him towards speculative forecasts. He had cultivated his predilections along all sorts of scientific horoscopes, and had enjoyed the indulgence of his fancy in studying nations and inventions, with a view to composing a plan or description of their future condition, phase and expression. He had arrived at some curious results, but they represented solely the changed surface of society, in its industrial, civic or social states, or else, in their more immaterial flights, pictured the enduring alterations of religious or philosophic systems. In all these speculations he had quite neglected the physical constants of the world, its climate and topography. His thought engaged itself with the mechanical127 structure of civilization, as affected by new discoveries, allied with an increasing utilitarianism, in which the individual vanishes before the imperious supervention of the State, the incorporated multitude, the abstract Wisdom of the most knowing minds, influenced by a solicitous paternalism for the Whole.

But now he found himself confronted by a new exigency, the geological interferences of Nature, and it piqued his curiosity, it assailed his fancy with indubitable fascination. By reason of his intellectual proneness to these questions, which quite deeply occupied his mind, he felt at this moment that the tremendous and supreme chance of his own mighty nation, succumbing to the accidents of a tidal caprice might offer him an alternative refuge of interest which would help to dull the pain of his misfortune. So convulsing a spectacle as the pitiless war of nature upon the embedded bulwarks of a great commercial nation’s prosperity, terrified him as a possible historical fact. Above all, it terrified him as a British subject. It became so overwhelming in the magnitude of its effects that he shudderingly admitted to himself that his love for Sally suffered a relieving diminution, as though in such events the End of the World seemed precipitated, and all human ties became obliterated, were dissolved.

The day closed in resplendent beauty. The sun128 curtained in a haze, shed a diffused glory through the upper sky, and sank at last in a grating of narrow bars of cloud, that lay across the west like reefs of gold, slowly transmuted into a purple nimbus upon the faintly turquoised ether. The great crowds dispersed, the troops escorted the President away, and music from near and far seemed to mingle dreamily with the mute harmonies of the sunset.

The Garretts, with Mr. Leacraft and Brig Barry, returned that night by train to Baltimore. The night proved a sleepless and excited one for Leacraft. He felt ill at ease. There was much reason for uneasiness and heartache, and the hours passed in a dull series of mournful reflections upon his own trouble, and the immodest threat of nature at the prestige of his people.

The next morning he entered the library and found Miss Garrett bending over the morning paper. She looked up as he appeared in the doorway, and there was for both a moment’s hesitation, before the morning’s greeting passed their lips. It was Sally who first spoke, and her voice was eager with alarm.

“Mr. Leacraft, the President’s lecture—surely, it was nothing else—is all here. And there is more news from the Isthmus. The land is sinking, all sinking, and”—she turned to the paper—“almost all the canal has now disappeared beneath the assault of the waves, and a stormy waste of waters129 sweeps across the Isthmus of Panama. Isn’t it simply fearful? And nothing can be done.”

“Miss Garrett,” answered Leacraft slowly, his eyes sadly resting upon her face, grown more beautiful, he thought, by the dwelling of a tender fearfulness in her eyes, “it is a fearful thing; an occurrence such as this is a pretty sharp shock to our sense of security. I can’t forget the President’s words. As an Englishman I really contemplate coming events with a positive terror. But there is something else, Miss Sally, I beg to speak about, another sorrow for me, though I must not permit my selfish regret to cloud your happiness.”

Sally Garrett came quite close to Leacraft. She had a true estimate of his strong and dignified nature; she yielded the just homage of affectionate regard, but her heart had never been moved by the Englishman’s impressive seriousness. Leacraft was about to speak again when voices were heard approaching, and among them the vigorous intonations of Brig Barry. Leacraft stopped, and a shadow of suffering crossed his pale face. Sally understood too clearly. She put out her hand and seized his, and pressed it kindly, and Leacraft understood her sympathy.

Brig and Ned Garrett came into the room, and soon the discussion of the strange events taking place at the Isthmus occupied the group, to which in a few minutes Mr. and Mrs. Garrett were added.

130

Leacraft shortened his visit under the pretext of an engagement in New York, and it was years after that he again saw Miss Sally Garrett—then become Mrs. Brig Barry—after the stupendous facts on the following pages had made the Kingdom of Great Britain part of the Frozen North.

Alexander Leacraft was standing at a window in the upper story of the Caledonia Railroad station in Edinburgh, November 28th, 1909, and was gazing with fixed and tormented eyes upon an unusual scene. The sky beyond Carlton Hill was leaden grey with the blear dullness of a snow-laden atmosphere, and a singular and menacing bar of half-eclipsed red light, like a cooling bar of incandescent iron, shone with irregular palpitations through the descending sheets of snow. It was a strange and appalling picture. Already a week’s precipitation had filled up the deep moat of the Princes’ street gardens, choked up the tracks of the North British Railroad, mounded the ragged edges and wandering parapets of the Citadel, until its outlines were effaced in a colossal accumulation, like a titanic snowball, and a long incline of spotless132 snow sloped to St. Cuthbert’s Church, itself half buried in the powdery blanket. The blurred lineaments of Calton Hill, so familiar and so beloved by Scotchmen, were uncertainly descried, the Nelson monument, the unfinished peristyle, the mediaeval ranges of the penitentiary, the cheese box summit of the observatory (already the large group of buildings on the Pentland Hills had disappeared from sight), and the classic sombreness of the college fascade. Had Leacraft been near at hand, he would have seen that the monument to Scott—the tribute to one fame by the aspiring genius of another, dead before fame had quite enrolled him in her categories—was deeply buried, and that the inclined head of the Wizard was quickly vanishing under the piled up pillows of billowy snow.

Alexander held a field-glass in his hand; the window at which he stood was open, and the snow blowing in upon it had raised a mound about his feet. The observer was, however, oblivious to this invasion; he leaned far out, and turned his inspection from point to point with rapid movements and obvious anxiety. A curious thing was happening immediately below him, and astonished him. In the leafless branches of the churchyard trees had gathered a vast concourse of crows, and the black-feathered congress was being momentarily augmented by new arrivals streaming in from all quarters, too evidently dislodged from more natural and habitual133 resorts. Their discordant cries seemed a melancholy symbol of doom. An awful silence otherwise possessed the Athens of the North. It was practically a deserted city, and its desertion was only part of a widespread calamity which now had begun the shocking chapter of national eviction.

The usual hum and bustle of the streets had gone; the tramcars no longer trundled through its streets, and a half-hearted effort to make a path along the centre of Princes street accommodated a few distracted pedestrians and official retainers, yet unwilling to join the army of migration which had slowly moved away from a city, that the pitiless rigor of a new dispensation in climate had doomed to a wintry burial.

Alexander Leacraft himself awaited reluctantly the departure of a train of emergency which was expected to carry away the last remnants of Edinburgh’s population. He had come to the unfortunate city freighted with misgivings, when the news reached London—itself experiencing peculiar vicissitudes—of the terrifying severity and earliness of the winter in Scotland. He recalled his forebodings, which the President’s speech had awakened, though the later reports of the complete reversal of the Gulf Stream into the Pacific, and the accomplished destruction of the Central American Neck of land had already stirred the scientific minds of England134 to the utterance of half-hearted warnings.

The matter had now suddenly loomed up into a frightful reality, and the devastating storms sweeping out of the black heart of the north, had brought Scotland, the Faroe Islands and Iceland into a common fate of extinction. The sheltering power of the Gulf Stream was removed from Great Britain, and the frost of the Arctic world, so long repulsed, but now no longer compressed within the Arctic circle, expanded with instantaneous certainty, spreading the shroud of its killing cold over the same latitudes in Europe that for ages had slept beneath its spell in America.

The population in part of the north of Scotland had escaped by means of ships to other countries or to southern England. Many villages, isolated houses, and remote districts had suffered cruel hardships, and the entombed bodies of thousands of families waited for a recovery which perhaps only in ages “yet unborn” could come to them. The white burden of snow mantled the valleys and hillsides of Scotland, the higher hills of the Trossachs, and the Grampians, the defiant crest of Goat Fells in Arran, and the twin peaks of the Island of the Holy Mount. Enormous drifts had risen in white waves almost to the summit of Bruce’s monument at Sterling, and the old Abbey of Cambuskenneth had disappeared. Ice of great thickness prevailed in the Clyde, and the movement of the tides had135 forced it up in threatening hummocks upon the drab stone cottages and villas of Greenock and Gourock. From Aberdeen to Leith the cities had been slowly deserted, after desperate efforts to free them from their entombment. The trains going south to England were loaded with the rich contents of mansions and summer castles; agonizing scenes had been witnessed at a thousand points where the heart-broken people sadly turned their backs upon all they had, and all they loved and knew. Heroic rescues were as numerous as the occasions demanding courage and inflexible daring had been frequent. Throughout Great Britain the trembling soul of the nation shrunk upon itself with a nameless dread, as it suddenly found its existence confronted with the inexorable processes of nature, when the appalling and relentless squadrons of the Ice King, with vengeful speed, issued in all the fierce panoply of wind and hideous life-killing cold, from the last tenements of their abode, to slay a prosperous and proud people.

Europe felt a sickening doubt as to the permanence of its life and works, and the autumn brought the shrewd and eager fingers of the cold into the streets and houses of Hamburg, Berlin, Cologne, Antwerp, Amsterdam, Ostend, Havre and even Paris. Attention to the vaticinations of science was mingled with the prophetic denunciations of religious frenzy. Pallor marked the features of136 the rulers of the people, and speechless stupor had seized the common people, who looked to the skies in pitiful confidence that their misery and desolation would touch the heart of that inscrutable Providence, who, reigning beyond the stars, held the reins of the winds and the bit of the frost in his multitudinous omniscience.

But in England, and especially in Scotland, at the opening of the dreadful winter, the precipitation of snow had attained monstrous proportions. For four weeks the vault of the skies had been thick with falling clouds of snow.

Leacraft left the window and descended the solitary halls, no longer swept by groups of tourists, to the street. A broken crease in the snow banks offered him a precarious access to Princes’ street. It appeared almost obliterated in places, at others it seemed a narrow slit between threatening walls of snow, that almost toppled over it, while blinding storms of fine particles, hissing over the undulous surface above, at times poured into the compressed chasm, filling it up many feet in a second of time. Abandoned cars, stalled one behind each other, for a block, both on Princes’ street and under the Castle, in the Lothian road, had become the refuge of the workers, and some were made into improvised hospitals and camps. A few relics, half-starved, and fainting with fatigue and exposure, were being treated with rough consideration in137 these accidental retreats, which, buried under snow, resembled caves, the feeble light of oil lamps and candles yielding a flickering illumination through the dull chill gloom within them.

Leacraft made his way with difficulty to Princes’ street, and groped along the aisle that cut the street in two. Here he discovered a phalanx of men with sledges and mallets, who, by dint of passing to and fro, without clearing away the snow, were compressing it into a sort of solidity that gave a firm footing. With the continuous fall of snow, and the abrupt windfalls of snow drifting into the cut this path was rapidly rising, and was also most irregular in its outlines. At some points it rose high enough to permit anyone walking on it to see above the adjoining banks of snow. One of these elevations was directly opposite Hanover street, along which formerly ran the cars to the Botanic gardens. Leacraft had reached this spot and stood an instant upon the commanding back of pounded snow, looking with amazement upon the silent waste around him, the sunken gardens to the south marked by a wide superficial depression, with their terraces on either side outlined in shoulders of white. To the north, up the low hill that culminated in George street, he saw the houses on either side buried as high as their second stories in the snow, from which their attic stories emerged like titanic gravestones. The statue of George IV. had138 become the centre of a rotating whirl of snow that kept the nether limbs of that potentate from the encroaching crystals, but had carved out an inverted cone in the packs around him, whose curling edges hung over like cornices about the strangely excavated bowl. It was at this point that Leacraft’s ears caught a distant sound of mingled cries—a piteous union of a woman’s voice, quickly succeeded by the more robust shout of a man. The sounds seemed to rise and fall. They were at times almost lost in the rising roar of the wind, or reduced to ghost-like semblances of sound, and again they came with the clearest impact on his ears, the shrill scream, the longer resonant “Hallo,” or “Help.” It was impossible for him to determine whether the cries were answering each other, or whether they indicated a mutual and consentaneous peril.

He was not alone in their detection. A number of figures—those of the men engaged in keeping the paths open—all sheeted like ghosts with a pellicle of icy snow, had slowly gathered about him, drawn together by this weird summons. A distinct horror possessed them. There was somewhere in the immobile and voiceless streets before them at least two perishing lives. Could they be found? Could they be extricated from their rising tomb of snow? At times the voices grew fainter, as if their subjects were surrendering their vitality to cold and exhaustion, and then again they139 sounded in the approaching darkness—there were now no lights at night in the doomed city—more appealingly clear as if by a despairing struggle of strength they hoped to prolong their fruitless invocation. No one spoke. Leacraft broke the silence.

“We must save them,” he said.

“It’s nae canny wark to do,” muttered one of the shapes nearest to him.

“But it’s a grewsome matter to let them dee that wa,” urged a second.

“Weel, weel, they’re nae the farst. The country side is as fu’ o corpses as a crow’s gizzard o’ oats,” admonished a third.

Leacraft had been listening. He felt sure that the sounds proceeded from somewhere on George street, a little to the eastward of its intersection with Hanover. He suspected that the fugitives had taken refuge in St. Andrew’s Church. He turned to look at the muffled forms about him. “If two of you will help me, with snow-shoes we can reach them.”

There was at first no response, only a protesting shrug, and a disposition to avoid any direct refusal by moving away. Leacraft spoke again. “The snow packs easily; we can get there on snow-shoes in a short time. There can be no danger. These unfortunate people are imprisoned in the church, I think; there’s a woman there; the man needs help to get her out; he probably could140 break his way over here, but he can’t drag her with him, and he won’t leave her. It’s murder to turn our backs on them.”

Leacraft was alone, save for the presence of the second speaker. The rest had disappeared, and the thud of their mallets and the rattle of the sledges acquainted him with their distant operations.

“Meester, I’ll gie ye a haud. There’s snaw-shoes down the track in a tram; I’ll hae them here in a jiffy.” He vanished down the long cut.

Leacraft called after him: “Bring two bottles of whiskey. You can use my name for them at the hotel.”

While he waited for the man’s return, Leacraft outlined a possible avenue of approach to the imprisoned couple, if couple it was. He could indistinctly see—the day was waning—that on the west side of Hanover street, by reason of the north-westerly direction of the storm, the housetops had formed a partial protection to the street below, and that the heavy ridged hill of snow occupied the centre of the street, lurching over against the west. Up the short slope this partial shelter continued, but in George street, beyond, the storm drove scurrying blasts of wind that whirled the snow upward in fantastic pirouetting volleys, and, doubtless, with wicked intent, had piled the drifts up in insurmountable entrenchments against the doors of the141 buildings on that street. The prospect of progress there was discouraging. Still there would be ways; the renewed calls nerved him to desperation.

The volunteer returned with the snow-shoes, a pair for both of them, and an extra pair for the imprisoned man, and the bulging bulk of three bottles of whiskey. He explained the latter excess: “They gied me the thraw, and I had no heart to haud the ither back. Let well eneugh alone, I say.”

“Now, my brave friend, we must know each other’s name, though we shall not be separated, as we must be tied together. But men working in peril become close companions,” said Leacraft to the man.

“Weel, sir, it mak’s sma’ difference what name we go by, but, an’ you like it, just ca’ me Jim.”

Leacraft opened one of the bottles of whiskey, and handed it to his companion, who eagerly accepted the invitation, and took so hearty a draught that Leacraft felt some misgivings over his usefulness. The man explained: “Ut’s no dram habit I have, sir, but the cauld ha’ gone to mee bains, an’ the wee drap pits fire in my sperit. It’s bonny stuff. It’s nae mickle harm to keep the fires burning in a blast like this. Tak’ my advice and do the same yoursel’, sir.”

Leacraft was indeed not unwilling to follow this example, and thus reinforced, the two men plunged142 into the snow banks that with irregular surfaces of hills and valleys spread before them. They floundered desperately forward, finding that the snow-shoes were indispensable, and the precaution of being tied together most helpful. The calling voices, with intermittent pauses, were still heard, and both Leacraft and his companion exerted themselves to return the calls with reassurance. It was evident that they had, at least at times, been heard, for the distant shouts became timed to their own, and this indication of recognition served to strengthen and increase their efforts. The work was difficult, and with recurrent accesses of the storm’s fury, the snowy wreaths, detached from the cornices of the houses, or whirled from off the edges of the tumultuous drifts, blinded and overwhelmed them. Fortunately, the wind came in gusts, and it was this circumstance that permitted Leacraft first to hear the voices. Between the wintry assaults of the wind, in the pauses of its fury, they stumbled on, forcing their way under the shelter of the western houses, and, at the corner of George street, struck boldly out towards the monument, where Leacraft had discerned the inverted cone of snow. The cause of this formation was now apparent, and rendered their further progress more precarious. The wind surged down George street, and by a slight deflection in its course from the axis of the street itself, was thrown into a vertical143 motion at the corners of Hanover street, and became a cyclone, whose towering and fiercely moving walls were materialized to the eye in the successive shells of snow raised in oscillating spires above the tops of the houses, where it again was seized by the direct wind and sent in dusky masses skywards. The picture of George street at this point was appalling enough. The snow lay deeply piled in the street, forming a high central ridge, and crossing this obliquely were traverse drifts which had a slow motion down the street towards the Melvill memorial; these even at times coalesced, assuming the aspect of a big comber at sea, and advancing with similar menace. When these snow billows flowed into the depression about the statue, they filled it, and then the revolving winds, like a gigantic and invisible augur, excavated it again, tossing the snow out in spurts resembling the geyser-like bursts in front of a snow-plough. At such moments it would have been almost impossible to have crossed the spot, with the buffeting wind shaking with flagitious fury the folds of snow about the traveller and entombing him also in their rising sheets.

Leacraft and Jim had just reached the eastern edge of the hollow described above, when one of the travelling billows of snow poured into the pit on its western margin, and the impetuous blasts began to dislodge the inrushing tide with incredible144 velocity. The shocks of snow overwhelmed the rescuers, and for a moment it seemed as if the contest between them and the fury of nature was too unequal a struggle. The support of the snow-shoes held them fairly well above the snow, but this onslaught knocked them down, and once down, the industrious drifts hastily began their entombment. To speak was impossible, and all Leacraft could do was to jerk the rope which connected them, as a summons for Jim to reach him. His purpose was obvious. Together, one or the other might make such a purchase of his companion as to extricate himself, and then assist his friend to rise. Jim understood the suggestion of the pull, and groped his way forward, and touched Leacraft, whom he found prostrate. His body offered a flooring for him to rise upon, and in this way he regained the surface, his head emerging into the blustering air. He quickly established himself and hauled Leacraft upward, who expected the movement, and had drawn his knees upward to help him regain his feet. The two men were now again upright and in action, but terribly exhausted and half immersed in the snow. The wave had passed and reformed partially after its disruption, while its north and south wings, which had escaped the passage of the pit, like white breakers, moved on before it.

A simultaneous motion with both, which had something almost comic in it, and would not have,145 under different circumstances, escaped receiving its tribute of merriment, brought from the pockets of each the whisky bottles, that quickly contributed some of their contents to the renewal of their ebbing strength. As they carefully replaced the helpful vials, they heard again, but now more clearly, the renewed shouts of the imprisoned captives, and Jim, putting his hands to his mouth, screamed with all the force he could put into the effort, “Coming.” It carried, and something articulate returned, which to Leacraft sounded like “Come quick!”

Their strength renewed, the two men began again their brave combat with the elements, and forced their way across the snow fields towards the houses on the north side of George street, which furnished a slight shield against the ferocity of the storm. A helpful lull in the blast enabled them to make their way more quickly. The walls of St. Andrew’s Church were near at hand, and all doubts as to the position of the voices were removed. The calls came very clearly to their ears. Creeping along the edges of the houses, they succeeded in reaching the church, and found that, on the back of the drifts, they were then at the level of its upper windows. The men peered into the darkness beyond the panes of glass and knocked vociferously. Voices and steps answered them. The next moment a man’s figure could be discerned advancing,146 and then the window opened. Leacraft entered first, followed by Jim, and both turned to the yet silent figure beside them. His silence lasted scarcely an instant. “God!” he exclaimed. “You have come none too soon! We should have died here! There is a young girl downstairs, a friend of mine. We started for the train, and just in front of the church she fainted. I drew her in here, as the door was open. A chill followed; I could not carry her away in this storm, and we were caught. It was our last chance. I can’t explain now the reason for our remaining so long behind the rest of the people who have left Edinburgh. We are here. Can you get us out? I can shift for myself, but Ethel—you see it is impossible. What—what—”

Leacraft interrupted. “Explanations are not needed. We must all get out of this at once. We must take her between us, and fight our way back.”

Already he had begun to move towards the flight of stairs near to them, to descend to the man’s companion, when the man seized him by the arm, passed him, calling to them to follow. They descended rapidly, and saw on the ground floor of the church, lying in a pew, with a flickering gas jet burning feebly above it, the figure of the woman the man had mentioned. She had propped herself on her hand and elbow, and gazed at the three faces looking down on her, with a frightened, still expression, in which relief and confidence, however,147 were not altogether absent. Jim had already brought out the whisky bottle, and, with unpractised directness, offered it to the girl. “Here, my leddy; tak’ a sip of this, and let it be a good one. An’, gentlemen,” turning to Leacraft and the stranger, “it’s awa’ with a’ o’ us, or the deil will mak’ our shrouds.”

Leacraft turned to the man. “Have you snow-shoes?” he asked. “Yes,” answered the stranger. “Then,” continued Leacraft, “we will start. Out of the window upstairs. Jim, you go ahead, and I and the gentleman will carry the lady. Madame,” to the lady, “this is a forlorn trip, but it will soon be over, and I feel we can trust you to help us.”

“Oh, yes,” came the rapid reply. The girl started to rise, and her companion helped her quickly to her feet. The party was ready, and without further words the four ascended the steps, made their way to the window, and after one glance at the raging weather outside, another reassurance for all from the indispensable bottles, the plunge was made.

The two fugitives, if such was a proper designation for them, were well clothed, and the risk of exposure was avoided. It now was a question of physical endurance only, and partly, too, of some possible leniency in the weather. Already their previous steps were thickly buried in the flowing tides of snow, and Leacraft and Jim noted with148 apprehension that the wind seemed fiercer, and the way back towards Hanover street blacker and more obscure, with volleys of snow dust thrown upward in increasing clouds. For a moment the party hesitated, and Leacraft and Jim both seemed over-awed and perplexed. Almost at the same moment they cast their eyes towards the corner of George and St. David streets, and saw to their wonder and delight that the front of the Commercial Bank building was relatively clear of snow, and the intimation furnished by its appearance was that the way was more open on St. David street and that in that direction egress and safety lay.

“This way,” was the laconic order from Leacraft, and they turned eastward. Leacraft and the stranger, who had given his name as Thomsen, supported the woman between them, and she was directed to throw her arms around their necks, and the sense of support to this frail girl, whose face, terrified and pale from weakness, yet had revealed to Leacraft a winning prettiness, made both men alert and strenuous. An obstacle of some seriousness stood before them; two heaped up mounds occupied the centre of the street. It was between these mimic hills that they made the fortunate discovery of the comparative freedom of the opposite corner, as it was in a measure the interposition of these very barriers that kept it so. But the passage—the cleft—between these mounds, that somehow149 seemed rigid points, underwent startling alterations. It was filled up with avalanches of snow, which at almost regular intervals were driven out by the massive wind pressure, and the dislodged bodies of snow were seen to spread out toward the south on the opposite side of the mounds from the observers’ position, in geyser-like spouts. It was necessary to thread this pass, but it would be inevitable danger if they were caught in one of the recurrent avalanches. Sinister as the chance seemed, it must be taken. And towards this triangular cut they slowly moved. Jim was in front of the little group, which, sheeted with snow, with bent heads and in silence, resembled Arctic explorers, as they are pictured bringing in some dying or exhausted companion.

The wind was somewhat behind them, though in the collision of the reflected waves from the houses on the south side, the vexed air shot about them in a hundred contradictory directions, and held them in a tempest of draughts. And now they were at the northern slope of the mounds; the cut was open; it had been cleared a minute before. Through it they saw more plainly that the bank steps and the corner of St. David street presented more favorable conditions; a dash and they would effect their escape. Leacraft had not failed to notice that the intervals between the inexplicable down-rushes of snow into the gap, were about three minutes, and150 that something more than that time elapsed before their expulsion. He whispered to Thomsen, whose fatigue was becoming too evident, “Keep up, sir. Once through this hole, and we are safe.”

During all this time since their entrance through the window of the church, Leacraft and Jim had remained tied together, and the strong, steady haul of the workman upon the rope now greatly assisted Leacraft, who was quite sensible that he must largely depend on his strength at this critical moment for their preservation. It was certainly no exaggeration to say that as they entered that rather inconspicuous gateway, between two snow drifts in George street, Edinburgh, in November 1909, they stood on that metropolitan thoroughfare, in the Jaws of Death. The simile may sound and look shockingly untrue. It is the exact truth. The white inclines rose on each side of them, and the width of the wintry embrasure was about twenty feet; in less than a minute even with their lagging steps they would have crossed it. Suddenly Leacraft felt himself pulled sideways; only the rope stretched tightly between himself and Jim saved him from falling, if falling it could be called, where they were so immersed in snow. Thomsen had dropped in his tracks and with a low cry of fear the woman’s arm slipped from his neck and she clung convulsively to Leacraft. It was critical. In a little more than two minutes they would probably be buried—which at151 this stage of exhaustion meant death. Leacraft tugged savagely at the rope, and the surprised Jim, almost thrown on his back, returned. A glance told him everything. Leacraft, without speaking, nodded to the motionless figure, beginning by reason of the icy chill smiting his face from the snow, to stir, and seizing the girl, passed on. Jim managed to jerk Thomsen to his feet, and half holding, half pushing him, hastened, lest Leacraft should feel his weight on the rope, and be hampered in his own struggles. It was slow work, the snow-shoes, so essential for their safety, could only be painfully shoved forwards beneath the snow. It was like wading in deep water but it was a likeness enormously enlarged in difficulty and strain.

They had not pushed through the miniature defile when symptomatic showers of snow drifted in upon them in blinding columns. The avalanche was coming. The terror stricken Alpine climber, who, behind some serac on the lofty glacier, has his ears assaulted with the roar of the descending avalanche, in no literal sense has greater reason for fear than did those men in the streets of Edinburgh at that moment.

Leacraft shouted, “On! On! On! One second and we are lost!” This despairing cry was not ill calculated to spur their efforts. The very agony of fright it summoned in the two men behind him gave them the strength of desperation. For one instant the152 spent muscles became steel. They floundered forward, and fell together almost in one heap beyond the portal of the two mounds as the swirling snow in torrents obliterated their outlines in new envelopes. Their fall toppled Leacraft over on his side. The confused objects, looking like some assortment of discarded bundles lay quiet, the darting cold had brought with it the treacherous drowsiness into their eyes, and had already begun to lock the keyholes of their senses. It was Jim who had roused himself to action. He struck Leacraft across the face with his gloved hand, and did the same to Thomsen, whom he again lifted to his feet. The smart of the stinging blow startled Leacraft on his legs; his nose bled, and he could feel the woman still stiffly clinging to him. It was Jim who now uttered the warning, “Get out o’ this. I hae the lugger all right. Get down to the bank.” Leacraft looked quickly. The bank steps were beneath them, and the vagaries of the storm alternately covered and cleared them of snow. Half rolling, he pitched down the slope, following Jim, who had his arm around Thomsen’s waist, and who, supporting himself on Jim’s shoulder, was manfully helping his rescuer.

In a few minutes, with staggering steps and frequent falls, the four gained the protection of the bank. This refuge acted favorably. Their spirits revived, and the whisky flasks assisted. Their attitude153 toward the storm became a little defiant. “We can do it now. It’s only a step around to Princes street. Ethel, how do you feel?” It was the young Scotchman who spoke, and the young woman even smiled as she answered “O! Ned, we shall be saved! How can we thank this gentleman?” “Excuse me” blurted out Leacraft, “we won’t waste time just now in an exchange of civilities. The opportunity for that formality will come when we are all out of this.”

He stepped almost impatiently to the edge of the building and found that a narrow crevice intervened between the drifts and the walls of the houses, and a further inspection revealed the utterly unexpected good luck, that this peculiar chimney way extended along the west side of St. David street to Princes street. Their safety seemed secured. In a few minutes after this welcome discovery, with careful steps, Leacraft insisting upon the Scotchman and himself lifting the young woman together, with Jim leading, the party slowly crept out and along the buildings on St. David street, and in a short time had reached Princes street, where more arms, vigorous legs, and robust bodies helped them through the shooting drifts into the open rift, that the men and sledges were still precariously maintaining.

Leacraft hurried Thomsen and his charge to the hotel; he turned to Jim, and grasped his hand fervently,154 “You’ve been a true man, Jim. I shan’t forget this. Every one leaves Edinburgh to-night by the train. I want you in my compartment. This young woman and her friends will be with me. I’ll find you at the hotel before the train leaves. Watch for me.” As he spoke, and before the expostulation on Jim’s lips was uttered, a long hoarse whistle like a wail came to their ears. It was the warning of the trainmen fearful to delay longer their departure from the doomed city—and with it, hurrying steps, shouts and injunctions along the cut, indicated its recognition.

“Come with me,” cried Leacraft, and together the men ran forwards, towards the Lothian road, finding themselves as they advanced in a jostling crowd, animated by but one hope, escape from the buried capital.

The condition indicated in the foregoing narrative, may now be more explicitly reviewed. The dislocations and subsidences in the Caribbean and Central American areas had developed along constructional lines, and had swept away the lesser Antilles and the Isthmus.

These formerly elevated points were simply projections upon two orogenic blocks of the earth’s crust, one extending from South America to Porto Rico, the other the narrower coastal shelf forming the isthmus. More plainly, these remarkable strips, curved in outline, and with a varying length155 of four hundred to five hundred miles, maintained a precarious stability with references to the adjoining edges against which they abutted, and when a shock, violent enough to rupture or release those edges, supervened they fell out and down like a brick or stone from an arch. When the more eastern of these blocks, that on which the lesser Antilles stood, dropped, the oceanic heated currents of the equatorial belt of the Atlantic rushed into the Caribbean basin as usual, but with a perceptible acceleration. The currents did not meet the frictional resistance of an archipelago of small islands. Their progress westward continued, through the almost simultaneously created outlet into the Pacific, by the submergence of the isthmus. Upon the first report of President Roosevelt’s apprehensions that this catastrophe would involve a disastrous diversion of the Gulf Stream, European geographers had contemptuously treated it as impossible, and stigmatized it as “an amusing futility of envy.” They dwelt upon this fact, that the Gulf Stream did not invade the bent arm of water forming the eastern water boundary of the Isthmus of Panama, but shot across this somewhat withdrawn angle, passing with undiminished volume in a straight path beyond Honduras, into the capacious pocket of the Gulf of Mexico. “Let it be conceded,” began an authoritative refutation in the London Times, “that the structural impediment to the mixture of156 the waters of the Atlantic and Pacific existing in the Isthmus of Panama is removed. Does mixture follow? By no means, that is in no way subversive of present hydrographic conditions. There will be a marginal intermixture, of course, where there is actual contact, but it is presumptuous and opposed to experience to say that two enormous bodies of water will promiscuously exchange their contents through an opening, relatively to their volume and extent, what a pinhole would be to the juxtaposed masses of two great reservoirs. Further, this disinclination, as a physical impossibility, of the waters of the two contiguous bodies of practically equal density to diffuse into each other, is increased by the strength and velocity of the Gulf Stream itself, which rushes past the isthmus deflection, and instead of being turned aside into that narrow aperture, would exert a suctorial influence upon the tides of the Pacific, actually (though this is in no way insisted upon) reinforcing its own volume and momentum by their contributions.

“There can be no valid reasons for anxiety in regard to the future of the kingdom so far—and that is very far indeed—as its prosperity and happiness depend upon a continuance of the supply of warm waters from the west.”

The writer of this article in the London Times had not realized, or had not heard of, the elevation of Cuba and the emergence of the broken range157 of keys between Cape Gracias de Dios and Jamaica, nor had he considered the “suctorial influence” of the Mexican current in the Pacific, southward on the west coast of Mexico and Central America upon the Atlantic areas, nor had he suspected the quantitative effect of a higher barometric pressure in the Atlantic over the pressure resident above the surface of the Pacific, a difference practically amounting to a push upon the surface distensions of the Atlantic in the direction of the Pacific, the very moment a sensible union between them took place. And it was a sensible union. His comparison of it to a pinhole was utterly misleading. Above a certain minimum, no matter what the size of the major bodies of water were, relatively, connection between them meant, under the circumstances, mixture, and a hole four hundred miles wide was much above that minimum. At the very moment when he penned this astute demonstration, the Gulf Stream had begun to throw its seething waters across the sunken isthmus. And the effects followed with startling rapidity. The author of the consoling reflections quoted, perhaps had hardly had time to have forgotten the obsequious reception his words received, when his admiring listeners were brought face to face with the worst consequences he had considered absurdly impossible.

The summer in Great Britain had been noticeably colder, and with the passage of the autumnal equinox,158 the winds increased in strength, and brought with them a terrifying cold. All records were broken, and the sinking thermometers withdrawing their silver threads into the diminutive bulbs, became suddenly the chief subjects of conversation. The corridor of the Houses of Parliament, the state room of Windsor, the clubs of Pall Mall and the parlors of the West End, no less than the alcoves of London Bridge, the shops in White Friars, or the auction stalls of the Ghetto, buzzed with the endless comparison of observations made on these hitherto unnoticed instruments of precision, and their slightest variations took precedence in the daily prints, over the aphorisms of the prime minister or the nullities of the king. An enormously increased sale of thermometers accompanied the sinister records of the deepening cold; importations of them from the United States spread an unprecedented wonder throughout the world as to the meaning of this change in climate, and the range of temperature, as the season advanced, was as much an object of solicitude as the growing expenditures of London, and more talked about than the fancied rupture between Spain and France. Meteorological journals were besieged with subscribers; Abbe, Loomis, Ferrel were as much in demand at the book stores as Glaisher or Thomson; Flammarion was as popular as Tyndal, and the lectures delivered at the British Museum had such suffocating success159 that the Red Cross Societies of London conceived the idea of public instructions for a tuppenny, to replenish their forgotten treasuries. The pedestrian and the chance acquaintance of the tramway would interview each other on the prevalent topic of alarm, and quote Wells, and Boussingault, and Daniel, and Quetelet, Forbes, Helmersen, Kamtz and Kupffer with more unction and accuracy than he did the current prices of wool or barley.

The fright began in the north, in Scotland. News first arrived from the Hebrides, of desolating cold and overwhelming snow storms; then the story was picked up by the Shetlands and Aberdeen, and then the really tragic fate of Iceland was recounted. The cable between Scotland and Iceland, completed in 1906, brought the tale. And a freezing tale it was. Iceland had become a snow heap; its interior valleys were filled up, from Heckla to Skaldbreid; from Skaldbreid to Esja one portentous blanket of snow had levelled all inequalities of the surface. The terror stricken inhabitants deserted their farms and fought their way to Reykjavik, leaving all they possessed of sheep, cattle and horses to be destroyed by the pitiless tooth of the Ice King. Reykjavik had been deserted; its people fleeing to ships and steamers as the remorseless winds piled up the white shrouds of its Arctic burial. The cable summoned assistance for those yet fighting for life on the water’s edge, where160 the sea air helped them to maintain a margin of cleared ground. Over ten feet had accumulated, and ceaseless blizzards, unchecked, and even increasing in fury, with a tireless and killing cold, had renewed the ice age within that boreal republic. The panic spread. From confidence and scorn the people of Scotland and England and Ireland plunged into the clamor of despair and maniacal forebodings. Religious fraternities of “Frigidists” were organized, whose exegesis made the prophecy of the End of the World a menace of destruction by ice. Geikie’s Ice Age, and Croll’s Climate and Time were read by earl and bellboy, and in the midst of the general consternation, the publishers of these books, in cheap form, doubled their business capacity and their fortunes.

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 prepared161 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! there162 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.

Leacraft had watched and waited. Every new development, each changing report, the wearily studied logs of the ships and steamers, the daily averages of temperature and rainfall, the swelling disorder in the climate of the United States, and confirmed rumors of the hot current—which might be the Gulf Stream—pouring, pouring northward, and hugging the shores of California and Washington and Oregon, and even repelling the cold from Alaska, supplying a stove to its shores, which, it was promptly surmised, would make of it a northern paradise, all, in a cumulative way, pointed to one result—the evacuation of England. His speculative mind hurried on to the picturing of the changed aspects of the national life, and he felt that for once Science, embodied in the laws of Nature, was about to put to flight the mentality of men, and pour the vials of its confusion over the proud, the boasting defiance of their thin optimism. And yet—what might not Opportunity perform? Perhaps the old receptacles of civilization needed emptying; their garnered seeds to be more quickly cast upon the winds of chance to germinate and flower again in the waste places of the world. And Leacraft163 hurried to and fro—a small inherited competency had dissolved his business bonds—a lonely, sad man, excited by the thoughts of the world’s trembling position on a new threshold of events, and thus forgetting the gnawing pains of his own disappointment.

During September he had been at the far north of Scotland, and retreated day by day with the invading cold, fleeing with its fleeing people, southward. On the memorable evening whose events have been rehearsed, he had found Edinburgh practically voided, and left to its entombment. The work of getting the people away, of convincing the incredulous, of providing for the needy, of deporting the treasures of this great depository, had been hastily and imperfectly done. In spite of Sir John C—’s useful plans, it could not be different. Disorder, recriminations, riot and clashes were inevitable at a moment of such sudden penetrating terror. Blocks after blocks of private homes remained with little or nothing of their rich contents removed. This condition was understood, and predatory bands of desperate men broke into them, encamped in them and defied expulsion. They laughed at warnings, and after filling their improvised camps with coal and stores, prepared with exultation to enjoy this novel debauch. Furniture and household effects had been dumped or deserted in the streets, and almost any extemporaneous164 digging in the drifts would uncover books, clothing and utensils. A grotesque hogarthian aspect had been produced by the retreat of the cats to the houses, and their mingled swarms at windows and on sills, whither they were strangely followed by hordes of mice and rats, expelled from the country and filtering into the city in scampering lines before the weather had reached the height of its tempestuous inclemency.

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 acquiescence165 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)166 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.

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 resisted167 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:

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 of168 money, very soon checked its use in the avenues of trade, while of necessity speculation and the desire for speculation simultaneously vanished.

It was the last train intending to leave Edinburgh that, on November 28th, waited for the Provost Marshal, and the little army of workers, and which Leacraft also expected to take. The tracks southward had been patrolled by trains of cars or locomotives for every five miles, and these had kept the way cleared, while they reinforced each other at critical junctures. When this last connection between the muffled city and the south should be broken, then practically Scotland returned, over the sweep of sixty thousand years, to a geological phase resembling that which Geikie, Scotland’s own great historian of nature, had described in these words: “All northern Europe and northern America disappeared beneath a thick crust of ice and snow, and the glaciers of such regions as Switzerland assumed gigantic proportions. This great sheet of land-ice levelled up the valleys of Britain, and stretched across our mountains and hills, down to the low latitudes of England, being only one connected or confluent series of mighty glaciers, the ice crept ever downwards, and onwards from the mountains, following the direction of the principal valleys, and pushing far out to sea, where it terminated at last in deep water, many miles away from what now forms the coast-line of our country.169 This sea of ice was of such extent that the glaciers of Scandinavia coalesced with those of Scotland, upon what is now the floor of the shallow North Sea, while a mighty stream of ice flowing outwards from the western seaboard obliterated the Hebrides, and sent its icebergs adrift in the deep waters of the Atlantic.”

Leacraft and Jim reached the hotel at the Caledonian station, in a crowd of breathless men, all anxious to escape to more reassuring neighborhoods. Thomsen and the young lady so opportunely rescued had availed themselves of the restorative resources of the hotel, and had largely recovered from the exposure and scare of their experience. Leacraft met Sir John C— standing at the entrance of the hotel, his face clouded with grief and anxiety. Strained to the last limit of endurance by his unwearied exertion to secure the safety of the people, and almost prostrated by the desolating sorrow of deserting the great city, the distinguished publisher expressed in his looks his intense misery of mind. Leacraft expressed a few words of condolence, which were hardly noticed, and then hurried to the former writing room of the171 hotel, where he found a fire burning, and a hastily prepared luncheon, around which a dense crowd of men were collected, filling the room almost to suffocation, greedily devouring the welcome repast, and muttering doubts of their eventually escaping at all if they remained any longer.

“Sir John hates to get away,” commented one. “He just can’t make up his mind to go. His heart is broke. But what’s the use? We can’t stay here and be buried alive. The trainmen say it’s a hard job now to get through, and all the way to Glenarken is full of big drifts. I say we must shake this, and it’s nobody’s right to run our heads into danger for the whim of a little love for the old town. Sure, we are all hard enough up, and it’s we that has not got a roof to our heads, nor a bite to our stomachs that has the worst to fear. It’s a cruel sufferin’ to think of it at all; but so it is, and it’s no use fashing.”

“Weel, weel,” said another, “it’s an awfu’ plight, and naebody can say what’s next. We maun better be dead than to pit our heads in a pother of snaw and wait for next simmer to melt us out.”

“Simmer, man, is it!” exclaimed a rough cart-man with a huge ham sandwich in each hand, and his jaws working on the remnants of their predecessor. “Simmer! It’s all up with the simmers frae now to the end o’ the warld. It’s bonny Scotland172 good-bye, and mind you, man, you’ll never see gorze again on the Queen’s Drive, I’m thinking, and you’ll never tak’ your bonnet aff on Arthur’s seat, nor pluck the daisy on Holy Rood mead. You’ll never canter to the Pentlands, nor hear the sang of praise go up frae the Roslin chapel, and you’ll nae hear the bell toll frae Grey Friars kirk, nor mark time wi’ the Hielanders in St. Giles’, and you’ll never bide the chance when you can see old Hay’s shop in High street, nor watch the middlings stare their een out at John Knox’s hame. It’s ower by naw,” and the good fellow turned away in a choking effort to repress his own tears, and swallow the generous morsels he had bitten from his overloaded hands.

Leacraft pressed by these disturbed groups, and found, after he had inducted Jim to the hospitalities of the various tables, his own strength and composure deserting him. He sank into a chair and covered his face with his hands. It seemed as if he had lived through some dreadful nightmare, and the weird and sickening sense of yet more miseries, rising thick and fast, covering with gloom a nation’s happiness, stunned him.

A soft voice awoke him. He looked up hastily and saw the lady whose arms, half an hour before, had clung unresistingly around his neck. She was unquestionably very pretty, and the returning flush upon her cheeks gave the alabaster clearness173 of her brow a singular effrontery of beauty. Elsewhere, or under different circumstances, it would have produced in Leacraft a momentary suspicion of artifice. As it was, it held his attention long enough for him to notice that the hair covering her head luxuriantly was a raven black, and was gathered beneath the hood of a soft brown sealskin fur, which clothed her form, while two wonderful opal bracelets, relieved with ruby jewels, in alternating links, most incongruously graced her wrists, the gloves on her fingers were evidently distended by rings, and a superb necklace of diamonds and peridots encircled closely her neck, seen through the half-opened cape. Leacraft rose mechanically to his feet, still conscious of effort, and looked wonderingly at the young face, and at that of her companion, Mr. Thomsen, the Scotchman.

“My cousin and I”—the voice was exquisitely gentle and expressive—“can never repay you. It is a slight thing to say to you how much we thank you, but it is not impossible that we can both yet show you our gratitude in some manner that will mean more than words, mean as much for you as your sacrifice meant for us. Is not that so, Ned?”

She turned to Mr. Thomsen, who advanced and accosted Leacraft with courteous alacrity. “I am sure, sir, you appreciate our sense of devotion to yourself. You extricated my cousin and myself from a certain and dangerous imprisonment. It174 might have been something more dreadful. And perhaps,” with a reluctant gaze at the young woman, and a smile of understanding for Leacraft, “you may wish to understand better how the perilous predicament you found us in occurred. It was very simple. This lady, Miss Ethel Tobit,” Leacraft bowed, “was left with myself, her cousin, at the home of her father and mother, on Pitt street, to complete the packing of a quantity of valuables which were at the last moment to be placed in a safe and left there for recovery later; it does now seem as if that word was a poor mask for Never. We had brought food for the house, and felt no fears of escaping before the streets became impassable. Then this last storm broke, and this afternoon, late in the day, we started out—but we had waited too long. My cousin sank under the exertion; I was disabled by a fall, in which my side was seriously bruised. We took refuge in St. Andrew’s Church, whose doors stood providently unclosed, though to swing them out I had to dig with my hands a crevice for their movement, in the rising snow banks forcing them constantly back. Our vigil began. The city in all directions around us was deserted. We could hear the workers on Princes street occasionally, in the lulls of the hurricane, and the whistle from the station sent thrills of anguish through us, as we felt we should soon be alone in an empty city. It was as impossible for us175 in our crippled state to return to the house in Pitt street as to reach Princes street. We then began calling, and it was you, sir, who responded. I think hunger and thirst would have made it impossible, even in the day, for us to have left our retreat, and only the—”

“Don’t, Ned,” cried the quivering girl; “don’t don’t! It’s too awful to think of. We need all our best spirits as it is—but to think—Oh! it’s too horrible!” And she hid her face against her cousin’s breast, and broke into sobs. Leacraft felt the embarrassment, and was ill at ease, though somehow at that mournful moment the sight of a beautiful woman seemed a compensation, and in this case, as she lifted her tearful face to Leacraft, piteously struggling to smile, it awoke in him a kind of ardor to be always near her. He looked almost tenderly at her and said: “I think I have every reason to thank my good fortune and this remarkable weather for a very pleasant adventure. Well, No!” he continued, as he caught the reproachful and grieving glance of Miss Tobit, “that is too cynical. Heaven knows we are all broken-hearted enough to-night to relinquish any false gayety, or even the appearance of it, but certainly, Miss Tobit, I hope this chance acquaintance will establish a friendship between us. It will be the only compensation for this night of agony, and perhaps for all the other nights of agony that still await us.176 You will not refuse it?”

Miss Tobit turned instinctively to her friend, and Leacraft, betrayed into an earnestness perhaps somewhat out of place, had a fleeting glance of an evanescent smile, and then the words, even more sweetly spoken than at first, came to his ears:

“It would be all your own fault if we fail to be friends. I am sure I can keep my side of the contract.”

Mr. Thomsen watched this brief exchange of promises not altogether with approval, if the faintly forming frown on his face meant anything, and the evident inclination to take Miss Tobit away from Leacraft’s proximity. But he was entirely courteous, and with a half-whispered comment that, “It would not do now to tire their benefactor any more,” he moved off and drew the lady with him. And then the summons came from the other end of the room that all was in readiness, that Sir John was on the train, and that the attempt to reach the south was to be made. There was much confusion and some indecent precipitation to gain the door, and in the rush Leacraft lost sight of his newly made friends, but found, to his great satisfaction, Jim at his side, for Jim had turned out to be that sort of a fellow that meets predicaments with coolness, and quietly, without words, instills confidence.

Leacraft was a little nettled over his seriousness177 with Miss Tobit, because it revealed again to himself that prosaic stiffness of language which he consciously recognized as having formed an element of failure with Miss Garrett, whose plastic wit found in it a source of amusement. He walked towards the door, wondering bitterly why women placed so much value on a turn of speech, or the accent of a compliment, when his musing discontent was interrupted by a hand laid on his arm. He turned around and saw a member of the Common Council of the city, associated with Sir John C— in the last days of the city’s government. The stranger accosted him. “Mr. Leacraft, the Provost Marshal wishes you to share his compartment. He has a great desire to speak with you on the affairs of the city, and the dreadful things which seem to be before us. This way, sir,” and he motioned to a large parlor coach in the centre of the train.

Leacraft retained him. Placing his hand on Jim’s shoulder, he said, “This man goes with me.” The councilman for a moment looked puzzled, but almost instantly rejoined, “Certainly, sir; your personal attendants are welcome.”

Leacraft laughed and exclaimed, “No, sir, this is no personal attendant of mine. This is only a brave man, whom I am proud to call my friend,” and as he turned to Jim the latter gave him a glance of the sincerest gratitude and pride.

The councilman waived the privilege of questions178 and nodding vigorously his assent, led Leacraft and Jim to the car of Sir John.

It was a car of an American type, and comfortably provided with couches and seats, tables and easy chairs. A number of men were already in it, and some refreshments, with the circulation of bottles of Scotch whiskey, showed Leacraft the unappeasible claims of man’s appetite, even in the ruins of his own fortune.

Sir John occupied a chair at a round table in a further corner of the compartment, and as Leacraft made his way towards him, the eyes of the city’s chief gazed at him in return with inexpressible weariness and sadness. Leacraft motioned Jim to a seat, and took the proffered hand of Sir John, who let his arm fall heavily on the table, and still kept his eyes fixed on Leacraft, motionless and silent. It was Leacraft who first spoke:

“I think, Sir John, that it was a few years ago that I secured your intervention for a poor fellow who was condemned offhand, and you were willing to help me turn the law back in its course, that it might have an opportunity to find out what it was made for—murder or justice.”

“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,179 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 the180 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:

Though the train made a toilsome way and interrupted progress, with steam sweepers ahead of it, the city soon faded away. The eye could not long pierce that forest of descending veils of snow, the sepulchre would soon be accomplished, and the spectators shuddered at the thought of those voluntarily immured and hapless wretches, who had seized this chance for a few hours’ reckless pleasure, and then—their own death, murdered by each other’s hand in the furious combat for survival, or choked with the many fingers of the frost at their necks. And Leacraft remained at the window still looking, while Sir John patiently waited, staring at his map, or raising his eyes expectantly to Leacraft, to resume his attention.

A bitter thought passed through Leacraft’s mind. Edinburgh had been faithless. Dressed in beauty, rich in reputation, nurtured in elegance and culture, she had been wickedly selfish. Her streets were filled with embruted men and women, with the vassals of drink and depravity; her picturesque quarters hid misery and vulgar need, unsanitary and simply mean corners of wretchedness, filled with creatures to whom life was an uneasy mixture of sleep and drunkenness. She had done nothing for these. Her life was part of the life of the whole kingdom, and the word of that life was selfishness,182 the stupid adhesion to conventional usage which kept the land from the people, which loaded taxes and rents upon a slaving many, for the perpetuation of an indulgent and luxurious life to the few. The upper surfaces of society, brilliant and dazzlingly sleek with pride, and puffed up with the vanity of knowledge, cushioned upon a contemptuous forgetfulness of duty, of sympathy, conceitedly viewing their reflections in Burke’s Peerage, or Chalmer’s Landed Gentry, begrudging every concession to modern sense of justice, denying the equality of men, fostering the silly homage of their inferiors, and rankly gathering around the idiocy of a futile monarchy. It was a class life, a class gospel, a class cultus, the arrogance of a classification of the humans of society, which made the joy of the world the prerogative of those who by birth or fortune found themselves foreordained to possess it, and who now—God willing—would fight every inch of their vantage ground to keep that advantage, believing that a fine suavity of demeanor, a generous support of fashion, a supercilious deference to education as an aristocratic embellishment, a pretentious clemency of judgement and an unfailing church attendance, would save them before any supernatural tribunal—if indeed such a tribunal existed—of particular blame. Those among them yet endowed with the pulses of human feeling, gentle in spirit and blessed with the better sentimentalities183 of religion, visited the poor, and dropped lunch baskets at their doors, and assumed the fine benison of stooping angels—a shallow thoughtlessness which did nothing for the regeneration of permanent social outrages. The unemployed might clamor, the poor might continue to multiply, and the young and ambitious might sail away on white wings to the new life of America, but the lord and landlord must still remain, because in the sight of the Lord God Almighty the lord and the landlord are part and parcel of the eternal order of things, an appanage of His eternal throne and a reflection of the rule of Heaven. And beneath all this was the sickly obsequiousness and snuffling adoration of ordinary men, which of course the lord and ladies despised, but which after all was helpful in keeping up the distinguished humbug.

This on its best side, but there was a worse side. There was moral depravity; there was ruthless wickedness; there was a set so smart that they defied decency and rectitude, and travelled on the currents of their passions to all the maelstroms of moral rottenness. The King himself had violated the measures of sobriety and faithfulness. And this imposing and historical structure, must now totter to its fall before the drifting snowflake. Truly the simple shall confound the wise. Leacraft turned from his melancholy thoughts to the friendly face of Sir John, who, catching his eye, resumed184 his conversation.

“This map will make it quite plain that the position of our nation as a commercial, as a political fabric, is a geographical absurdity, a necessary paradox. Look!” and Sir John pinned down the map on the table, and drew Leacraft down towards its attentive examination. “Here! is an occular demonstration of our false position, a charted proof that we are in a wrong place, a spot of possible change, that will reverse all previous experiences if the right conditions supervene. The change has come, and Scotland returns to its appointed allegiance. It belongs to the Kings of the Ice. See,” and he leaned over the map in a kind of ecstacy of despair, speaking rapidly as his fingers traced the lines he indicated. “See! consider these enormities. Land’s End and the Scilly Islands, where palms grow, are on the degree of 50 degree north latitude, which is the same as Notre Dame Bay in New Foundland, the same as Manitoba, the same as the most northern Kurile Islands. Do you know what the temperature of these places are? I will tell you. The average winter temperature of northern New Foundland is 10 degrees, that of Manitoba 9 degrees, and that of the Kurile Islands, 12 degrees.

“The average temperature of Land’s End is 40 degrees. Well, that may not strike you as a contrast so sharp as to warrant my dire prediction,185 but you must learn to see in average temperatures much more than is simply indicated in the mere differences in degrees. Averages are utterly misleading, so far as they mean habitable conditions. A temperature of 0 for six months, and a temperature of 80 degrees, for the remaining six months furnishes the harmless average of 40 degrees, but a land suffering from the affliction of a climate such as that, would be useless for the larger purposes of a civilized community. Averages produce an impression of uniformity, whereas they conceal the most obstreperous changes—and a small difference, such as you observe between the temperature of the Scilly islands, and these inclement and impossible districts of Canada or Kamtchatka, means that though all are on the same latitude, they are as diversely adapted for modern life as the tropics and the north pole. Why are the Scilly islands adapted for tulips and spring peas, when Manitoba yet sleeps in snow?

“From the point of view of a primary instruction in temperature, hottest at the equator, coldest at the pole, and graded all the way between; it is a preposterous caprice. It is a caprice. And a civilization flourishing under the auspices of a caprice, will come to grief. Climate is a symbol of vagaries, contradictions and sudden affinities. It is the atmospheric expression for the feminine and the poetic in men. As a matter of fact contingencies186 of interfering land surfaces, of changing barometric pressure, of oceanic tides, of air currents, of solar radiation, combine into a labyrinth of possibilities to make places that ought to be cold, hot, and vice versa.

“But they are evanescent possibilities, and the founders of empires who rely on them will some day be brought back with stunning, abject terror, as we now are, to the realization of first principles, that latitudes are invincible barriers to the diffusion of the race, and that the nations neglecting their plain meaning court disaster. Well; you know the explanation of all these whims of nature. The old story; the Gulf Stream with its millions of units of heat forced northward by wind pressure, and accelerated eastward by the equatorial velocity it starts out with, our insular position bathed in oceanic waters, holding immense deposits of the sun’s heat; the open seas north of us; the great furnace stores of heat in Africa, like a nearby factory heating our thin coasts. That is common knowledge—but these accidents of position, these migratory tides are holding in check invincible tendencies. Like a child’s push against an evenly balanced boulder they keep off the descent of disaster, but like another child’s push in the opposite direction, a sudden alteration of coast lines reduces our boasted exemption to a shadow, and London, Edinburgh, Liverpool, Glasgow, Paris, Amsterdam,187 Berlin, Hamburgh—the great cities of the world—pay at last the penalty of an infringement of nature’s Common Law.

“Heat is life, and cold is death, and no blank optimism may hope for national achievement in the frosts of winter. Our civilization, the civilization of northern Europe, has overstepped the limits of climatic permission, as this globe is made. We are the victims of a deception. Primary conditions of temperature are returning, a meteorological hoax is exploded, and 50 degrees north latitude will mean in Europe what it has always meant elsewhere. But look at Edinburgh, look at these isothermals on the map, attributing to her the temperature of far southern latitudes. Too obvious an absurdity to last. True enough. Yes, but fugitive; an episode only. So flat a contradiction of the economy of this round earth should never have misled us. And we have had warnings—”

Mr. C— stopped; his agitation fairly choked him. Leacraft sympathized with the gentleman’s distress. His bitterness of heart had created a mental hallucination, an unbalanced affectation of epigram. Leacraft interposed: “Well, Sir John, the empire of Great Britain has no reason to regret its existence, even if it is based on a climatic fallacy. There have been some things done in it which no change in temperature will obliterate, unless the Ice Age is returning and we all decline into188 extinction north and south, and the Earth is again without form and void. You speak of caprices. How can you tell this is not a caprice, too, a monstrous subterfuge of Nature to teach us a lesson, letting us come back again when we are better, when we can feel and keep grateful to Her for letting us live at all. You err in deduction Sir John. A round Earth exposed to the sun’s heat with a zenith movement from 23,28 north latitude to 23,28 south latitude, must exhibit water currents flowing north, and bringing with them equatorial temperatures. Such a fact is as normal as that the same earth must be colder at the poles than at the equator. You are involved in a sophism, because you assume a principle which is imaginary, so far as its invariable truth is concerned.

“And what warnings have we ever had?”

“Warnings!” said Sir John, after a moment’s silence during which he regarded Leacraft with a guarded hopefulness, “Warnings! Many.” And he took out a note book from which he read. “The winters of 1544, 1608, 1709, were terrific—the thermometer at Paris in 1709, sank to nine degrees below zero Fah. In 1788–1789, the river Seine froze over in November. Then there was 1794–5, 1798–9, when the rivers of Europe were frozen over. In 1795, the mercury in Paris registered ten degrees below zero, although at the same time in London the temperature was nearly seven degrees above zero.189 And then we have 1812–3 when Napoleon failed, defeated by the cold rather than the Russians. In 1819–20, in 1829–30, in 1840–41, in 1853–4, 1870–71, during the Franco-German war, with the cold greater at the south than in the north of France, and when—this is worth noting—the Gulf Stream was driven backward by a north wind, and banked up, as it were, at Spain and Portugal; in all these years there were intensely cold winters, which if continued, and reinforced by storms, and increased by the disappearance of some of the helpful agencies that now keeps up our supply of caloric, would mean, could only mean our extinction.

“Now as for degrees of cold—I quote from Flammarion—‘the greatest cold yet experienced has been twenty-four degrees below zero in France, five degrees below in England, twelve below in Belgium and Holland, sixty-seven degrees in Denmark, Sweden and Norway, forty-six in Russia, thirty-two in Germany, ten degrees below in Spain and Portugal.’ These are Fahrenheit records. These severities tell us our danger.”

“It seems to me,” rejoined Leacraft, “that they tell us nothing of the sort. It is a mild madness to misconstrue them so completely. These extremes of temperatures are far lower than any we have observed, and yet we have been expelled from Scotland. It is the snow. These endless heaping torrents from the skies that have driven us out, and190 they—I do believe it—will continue; but it has no parallel. Nothing warned us of this—and as to our climatic safety, it was as fixed as the change of day to night when, without warning, without precedent, a bridge of mountains tumbles into a hole in the sea, another bridge rises as a dam, and either occurrence seemed about as likely as that the moon would fall into the sun. I think indeed the advantage of a guess might have lain with the latter supposition.”

“Well. The snow; you say it will continue,” said Sir John with a sudden reflex action of revolt. “Why will it continue?”

“I estimate the probability for that in this way,” answered Leacraft. “The atmosphere is a system of balances never at rest, unless in equilibrium, and never in equilibrium except at rare intervals, and then in limited and favored spots. This state of inequilibrium causes constant motion, currents, storms, winds and precipitation, whether of rain or snow, depending on temperature and position. Now the motor power of the movement in all this atmospheric mass is difference of temperature, the hot air rising and flowing to the poles, and the cold air of the poles descending and flowing to the equator. That is the A. B. C. of meteorological physics. But the revolution of the earth causes the cold polar winds to blow from the northeast and the warm equatorial winds to blow from the southwest, that is with reference to our position in the northern hemisphere.191 Now if we are undergoing a progressive refrigeration, the contrast in temperatures between our latitude and the temperature of the equator increases, and because of that, the velocity of the wind blowing from the latter increases too, and the moisture that these winds would have dropped over the equatorial zones is carried further north, and our annual precipitation is thereby increased—our snow falls become more continuous and thicker. Think what the removal of the Gulf Stream means. Croll has clearly shown that the heat bearing capacity of the Gulf Stream is enormous. It seems incredible. I recall some of his statements. He says that the Gulf Stream conveys as much heat as is received from the sun by over one million and a half square miles at the equator, and the amount thus conveyed is equal to all the heat which falls upon the globe within thirty-two miles on each side of the equator; further that the quantity of heat conveyed by the Gulf Stream in one year is equal to the heat which falls, on an average, on three millions and a half square miles of the arctic regions, and that there is actually therefore nearly one-half as much heat transferred from tropical regions by the Gulf Stream as is received from the sun by the entire Arctic regions, the quantity conveyed from the tropics by the stream to that received from the sun by the Arctic regions being nearly as two to five. And it is this fact of the tremendous drain that the192 Gulf Stream makes on the equatorial regions, those immense manufactories of heat, that its removal—meaning the sudden abstraction of this heat or much of it from our latitude—produces a more forceful interchange in the airs of the north and the south. It produces winds of a higher velocity, and because of this, the wind coming to us from the Equator does not so quickly free itself of its contained moisture. Croll has shown in his splendid work of theory and proof, that the winds warmed by the Gulf stream are the true causes for our unusual and exceptional heat above corresponding positions on the western side of the Atlantic basin. The Gulf Stream gone, these warming winds will bring us heat no longer. But they will bring us moisture, and in larger quantities, and then the process of refrigeration over our chilled coasts will turn that into snow. The snows will be deeper, and they will last longer. In this way, Croll, defending himself against the criticism of Findlay, shows that the winds—the anti-trades blowing from the south to replace the atmospheric emptiness—I suppose we might say vacuum—left by the descent of the cold winds from the poles, parted with the most of their moisture in the equatorial belt. Now by reason of their greater velocity they will not do that; they will reach us much less despoiled of their watery burdens.

“Our highlands and our coast position make us193 natural condensers. To-day we have a rainfall in the year of about thirty inches. That may now be doubled. The southwest winds are our most general winds. Out of a thousand as a maximum, during the year, two hundred and twenty-five are from the southwest. These are wet winds. And in the same total there are one hundred and eleven south winds which also carry moisture, making a possible percentage of one third of all the winds that blow over us as rain winds, or now by reason of our altered state as snow makers. But this relative frequency will now be increased. There will be a longer continuation of the west winds, because as I have suggested they will be stronger. They are to-day most intense in the winter months. Our south and southwest winds gather moisture from a wide expanse of sea, the same expanse from which they formerly gathered heat from the Gulf Stream was widely diffused over the north Atlantic, both north and south, for as Croll shows, by reason of a high barometric pressure somewhere off the west of Maderia and a low pressure north of Iceland, the tendency of the air south of the English Isles at that point is to flow north. But these winds are no longer heat carriers. They bring moisture only. They bear to us through the air the winding sheets of our burial.”

The two men looked at each other, and it was a look of anguish. The sudden cruel dreadfulness,194 the hideous mutation which might send the English people out of their land on the strange quest for a new home crushed them into an emotional inanition. They did not seem to exist. Their lips lost their color, and only the paralysis of stupor saved them from breaking down into sobs.

It was a few moments later that Leacraft spoke. He asked, “And the people of Glasgow. How did they get away?”

Sir John Clarke scarcely raised his head and his words scarcely formed an articulate whisper; “They went by steamers.”

In the smoking room of the Bothwell Club, on Cheapside, back of St. Paul’s, London, on February 12th, in the year of grace, 1910, two men sat in attitudes of earnest attention. A third man older than either with his back to a blazing fire, whose simulated effect of comfort arose from the curling tendrills of gas flames that swept over another simulation of heaped up logs, was speaking with desperate emphasis. He seldom looked at his arrested auditors, nor indeed moved, except when he raised his head, and his eyes, strained with a hopeless longing, sought the gay frescoes of the ceiling, or when, in pauses of his declamations, he walked to a window and raising the curtain looked out upon the city, up to the dome of St. Paul’s, which rose like an Irkutsk igloo above a plain of snow.

The man was Alexander Leacraft, the auditors196 were Mr. Archibald Edward Thomsen and Jim Skaith, both familiar to the reader as rescued and rescuing, in that awful day of November 28th, when the last little band of citizens, led by the provost-marshal, had slipped away in the storm from Edinburgh. Strange things had happened since then: much stranger were in store. The train in which Sir John C— and his companions escaped, had made its way with painful slowness, and before the English line was reached had stopped repeatedly until it was necessary to desert it. And then the weary crowd of refugees had staggered on their way to a distant station, along a country side emptied of its inhabitants, with the low houses of the country people evident only as mounds of snow. And, with many struggles, with mutual assistance, with prayers and suffering, the men pushed on in the closest companionship, brought by the terrors and dangers of the journey into the usual unhesitating intimacy of peril. They took each other’s places in the work of excavation, helped all to flounder and press through the drifts, divided their company into the weak and strong, and so allotted tasks that the co-operation of all helped their common progress. Camps were made in which shelters were clumsily provided, with tents brought from Edinburgh, and which only the industry of the watchers saved also from burial in the tossing drifts.

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The frugal meals snatched by chance or at the favorable moments where inequalities of the ground permitted a more regular distribution and preparation of food served well enough. Now and then they espied a deserted house, and into this they crowded, enjoying the heat of fires made of the wood-work, the floors and windows of the house itself, while they dried their clothing, changed their shoes, and, gaining a respite and new strength, salleyed out again into the desolate landscape with its blue gray skies flaming with crimson, when the day set, and the snow cleared, and a sharpened icy edge of cold vibrated like an unseen but intensely realized cord stretched nippingly through the air. The leaders expected to reach a place called Tway stone, where a train was in waiting, which would carry them south of this immediate zone of the greatest snow falls. Grewsome sights were encountered, and the blanched faces of men turned away from the uncovered sepulchre of a horse and rider, now a child and mother, and sometimes in the wet morasses still unfrozen, beneath the towering ridges, the forlorn, immured body of a young woman with blanketed face and streaming hair.

Leacraft and Thomsen, with Jim, worked unremittingly with the young Scotch woman. They patched up a rude litter and they carried her on this, trudging toilsomely along, and watching her needs. Their care was affectionate and touching,198 and soon other strong men offered their help, for gradually the sensation gained place—so quickly does the human fancy cling to the vaporous skirts of superstition—that the girl’s safety meant the rescue of all, that her security carried with it the common weal. She became a fetich, and they rejoiced in caring for her, as if contribution to her welfare conveyed its unseen benefits to all who engaged in the kind ministry. Nor did she fail, with the living hopefulness of youth, and with her fresh winning loveliness, to establish a return. Her smile, the lingering gratitude she showed to all, her own usefulness and ready help at the stop and waiting places when her eager intelligence watched and directed the provisioning and cooking, rewarded the toilers. She was quick and resourceful, cheerful in exhortation and advice, and certainly—to Leacraft—always lovely. Thomsen had forgotten his first resentment at Leacraft’s apparent admiration for his cousin. The two men had become very intimate. Both felt themselves on the edge of new events, which were in part to be shaped by the blind forces of the earth, and in larger part as they affected England, by the sagacity and steadfastness of men. They talked much over these things together. Both were sombre and frightened. The invincible powers of nature, the unconquerable ferocity of nature which is deaf to reason, blind to suffering, made them shrink and quail. To meet its199 urgency with make shifts was impossible, to resist it madness; the line of retreat was the only line of escape. They felt this; the thought became oppressively dominant. They began at first to hint at it, they ended, quite quickly too, in predicting it with mutual confessions of dismay.

Both loved Miss Tobit, yet, as far as appearances went, only the guardian spirit of her dreams could have told the direction of her inclinations. Perhaps both seemed to her too dear, too much involved in the one peril with herself, to stand apart from each other in any guise or place of preference. Thomsen was the younger man, and he had the advantage of a handsome face, a fine form and a particularly deferential tenderness. Cupid and his mother are not slow to give such gifts their heartiest commendation. But Thomsen was generous to his somewhat reticent, and, probably not greatly feared rival, the prowess of beauty is generally undaunted and oftentimes magnanimous.

When the worst hardships of their journey were over, and in the less afflicted regions of England, where at the time the snow falls were not as deep, or the winds as tempestuous, Leacraft had many chances to talk with Miss Tobit, and he found her extremely affable, well informed and sympathetic, certainly not endowed with the mischievous drollery and the roguish merriment of Miss Garrett, and therefore not so piquant, tantalizing, and desirable,200 but very kindly and soothing.

The provost-marshal and most of the party went to Liverpool, whither, before, many of the inhabitants of Edinburgh had fled, but Leacraft and Thomsen kept on to London. They found conditions in London full of fright and trepidation, and the business interests floundering and collapsed. Leacraft took up his headquarters at the Bothwell Club, and Thomsen and his cousin found a home at a maiden aunt’s, in Claverhouse place.

But much as Leacraft would have craved an indulgence of sympathy and response, the audience of sense and appreciation, and the agreeable picture before his eyes of acquiescent if not admiring beauty, the fatal progress of events in the world of England kept him away from Miss Tobit more than he wished. These events were far from reassuring; they were directly and successively catastrophic. Their logic seemed inexorable; and Europe became rigid with attention as it watched with most varying feelings of commiseration the tightening grasp of frost and snow, wind and tempest, upon the destiny of England. Not that an actual submergence beneath snowdrifts was threatened, a hyperboreal sepulchre under which every Englishman lay, like the Excelsior youth, “lifeless but beautiful.”

No such shocking and shattering misery as had befallen Scotland had as yet engulfed England, especially201 its southern counties, but the darkening days brought more clearly to the observation of the most recalcitrant and obtuse, the most reluctant and temporizing, the fact that England’s climate was approaching that of Labrador, that the restraints of trade would soon become enormous, that its products would be unmitigatedly diminished and restricted, and that it could no longer raise wheat; that its railroads, for half the year, would endure a dangerous embargo; that its population would perish; that its industries would undergo the most serious curtailment; that foreign ports would absorb its commerce, steal its prestige, insinuate themselves, by its crippled resources, into the markets of the earth in its place; that the ramifications of disaster would penetrate its social, intellectual and political life, and cloud its mental horizon with the gaunt and stupid spectres of Torpor and Helplessness. This monstrous dilemma submerged all minor passions, and plunged England into the noisiest outbreak of argument, suggestion and panic-stricken questionings.

Leacraft buried himself in the questions that now with the more forward and statesmanly thinkers were coming to the front with relentless insistence. Amongst these, conspicuously outstrode and outshone the rest, H. G. Wells, the brilliant author and prophet of the New Republicanism, whose book had five years before roused an intense and frightened202 protest from the servitors of antiquity, and the selfish lackies of a superannuated and mythical class system. Mr. Wells, with his trained skill in scientific deduction and the exercised powers of imagination, with a reckless and defiant desire to unravel the future, with the slenderest regard for the prejudices of religion or old-fogey political conservatism, was now half-deluded himself with the sudden dream of starting the English nation on new grounds. Released from the impedimenta of ceremonies and ruins, names and titles, furnished with a tabula rasa where the new ideals of which he set himself up as a sort of avatar and preacher might most keenly set and develop themselves, he believed—as in a measure Leacraft did himself—that the English cultus would put on those insignia of the coming eras which meant intellectual emancipation, and a social and civil regime where the greatest happiness and the widest material prosperity would unite, in which, too, would not be wanting a radical rearrangement of the relations of the sexes, hinted at in the same author’s later books, but which again, naturally, by many who followed Mr. Wells a certain way, was indignantly repudiated. A more dignified and august group of men—among whom the names of Churchill, Chamberlain, Rosebery, Balfour, Prof. Stubbs, and Bryce led—had assembled themselves in a council of deeply concerned and profoundly patriotic203 advisers. These men secured a very noble elevation above the wild and unclassified miscellany of men and women who, with cries, denunciations, nostrums, whims, hallucinations, guesses and queries, deluged the pages of the Times, stood at the corners of the streets, where such standing was possible in the hard weather, and preached their fantastic mental wares. A still more obvious and ear-assailing group were the religious zealots, who thrive at moments of peril, filling the brains of their listeners with adjurations, exhortations, prayers, pictures and prophecies, for one moment doleful with wailing execrations of past wickedness, and the next piteously shrieking eloquent appeals for repentance and confession.

The singular and amazing thing in all this was the convinced assent given to the prediction of Science. Whereas at first the geologists and the meteorologists belittled and ridiculed the warnings of the President, they now enlarged, extended and enforced them with a greater authority, and more illuminated reasoning. Hardly believing that the people of England would realize this approaching disaster, what it meant, what steps should be contemplated to escape its worst effects, how permanent and deep-seated were its causes, the British Association for the Advancement of Science had resolved itself into a body of educators. Lectures were given where practicable, leaflets circulated,204 letters published in the leading dailies, and a comprehensive educational crusade started—and with one object—to instill a deeper dread of the future, a distrust of the possibility of the longer occupancy of the British Islands, and yet a firm reliance that under changed auspices of place, the same civilization, with unchanged features, would still continue to rule the world.

Parliament was constantly in session, and to it the worshipful English householder and pew-renter looked with unwavering faith, waiting for its sublime wisdom and intrinsic patience, to devise ways and means, and some safe policy of safety. Even the King became earnest, perhaps a little anxious, as among the most popular doctrinaire plebiscites was the reiterated need of an abolition of the discarded system of the royal household.

From the midst of all this confusion, organized and disorganized movements, the collapse of trade, the desertion of workers, the sudden emergence of a thousand voices claiming, clamoring, debating, the physical wreck of business, the inflamed transcendentalism that saw ahead of the present moment, re-adjudication, rehabilitation, renovation of all social wrongs; and with the cruel winter breathing its desolating rigors, the snow rising in the streets, the poor dying from starvation or exposure, the steamers crowded to their taffrails, daily exporting the timid and selfish rich, or the pinched poor, escaping205 with a bare competency, to establish themselves under less penurious skies—from all this there suddenly grew into stalwart and national proportions, the resolve to leave England.

It grew with a certain flaming ardor of noble hopes and resolves. It grew also with an agony of doubt. The whole implication of the idea was grievously wounding to pride, and it strained at the very heart-string of the English nature. To go away from England was to become un-Englished, to lose the rich heritage of pastoral beauty, the treasured wealth of historic associations, the spot and home of literary triumphs, the soil, the air, which by some impalpable union of efficacies made the English blood and temperament, and which could not be taken away to make the same fine product elsewhere. The pathos of it! A nation wandering homeless with its Lares and Penates in its arms, its face darkened with humiliation; its shoulders, that erstwhile bore the burdens of states, bowed with the shame of enforced desertion; its voice, that summoned the freemen of the earth to convocation, silent with fear, or perhaps broken by the irrepressible echo wrung from its own anguish, at turning its back on the cradle and the home of its greatness.

And yet it grew—this same resolve—and eloquence, and poetry, and prayers, and science, and statescraft united to make it strong and beautiful,206 to blend in it the supernatural benisons of religion, the purified affections of the heart, and the resolute affirmations of conviction.

“My friends,”—it was Leacraft speaking from the fireside of the Bothwell Club, in Cheapside, on the night of February 12th, 1910—“I think the speech to-day of the members from Scotland in Parliament was decisive. It leaves no alternative. We cannot hopelessly, in the face of this modern world’s competition, fight out a narrowing chance for existence under the conditions facing us. And it is an unmistakable alternative. Our climate has changed, and the change is irrevocable, and it is subversive, too. We must go away, taking all that we have with us. The English nation has reached a sublime crisis. We transplant our virtues; we will relinquish our failings; we have a world of our own to choose from, and we are given an opportunity unparalleled in history.”

“It’s a great chance to begin all over again,” expostulated Jim.

“Not at all,” resumed Leacraft, his voice rising with that peculiar English intonation of tenuity, which often animates their sluggist accents, if it does not soon soar into nasal squeaks;—“Not at all. We leave England with not a thing forgotten or lost. The machinery of our greatness is in our history, and in ourselves; the products of industry and art, so far as they are necessary fixtures,207 stay. What of it—a cathedral, a palace here and there? They often stand for things it would be best for us to forget, and under which perhaps only revolution and violence will make us forget, if we remain as we are. What stirs my imagination, what grows visibly before me”—both Thomsen and Jim watched intently the fervid Englishman, released into a sort of mystic clairvoyance—“is a new land which is a physical unit, which has known no political subdivision, which holds within it no inherited rages, and taunting bitternesses, as these islands do to-day. Let it be Australia, let it be South Africa—though there, I admit, is the memory of a bungle—but we enter it a single people, blended into homogeneity by adversity, and we set about the tremendously interesting task of re-creating England, at least in all things pertaining to her that are great and lovable.”

“I fail to see,” said Thomsen, “that the probabilities are that way. On the contrary, freed from the geographical confinement of neighboring islands governed from London, in a new land, Irish, Scotch, English will segregate again, and then scatter, just as might mixed races of birds, who, while they are in the same cage mingle, but when they fly out, fall back into their natural groups, by the most certain of all animal tendencies, that ‘like seeks like.’”

“Well, and what of it?” retorted Leacraft.208 “These elements are together in a new country. It is one. There is no history behind it of subjugation and ill treatment; there can be no reversion to bickerings and recriminations where even the monuments and milestones familiarly associated with injustice have disappeared. Besides, we leave behind the obnoxious, shameless law of entail—at least we shall be free of that disgrace—and at last—but,” he added, his voice again sinking to a pained whisper, “with what a wrench!”

“Well, Mr. Leacraft,” spoke up Jim Skaith again, “it’s mair than moving that has to be done. There’s the new land to be bought and settled. There’s getting there, and biding there. There’s schools to be built, and hames and shops, and, it seems to me, with pardon for being so forward, that if it took so many years to make a great city, it’s no fule’s wark to sail ower the seas and pit it up again”; then, after a pause, “An’ it’s never the auld hame.”

“No,” resumed Leacraft, “that is true. It’s not the old home, and a big city—the greatest—cannot be boxed up in straw and packing cloth and get set up by order in another place, with the precision of a movable bungalow. But we need not trifle. We all know that it’s no child’s work. We expect something very different from London. We can meet the emergencies of place and room. Our population can be distributed. Remember, we are on trial, and the new, strange chapter opening before209 us will bring again into view the inalienable fortitude and power of the English mind. It’s a test. The conditions are irreversible, and mind and character will win—must win—or slowly, surely, the stars of our ascendancy pale and disappear. Nature for a moment has thrown us in a great peril, but was it nature or ourselves that won us footholds throughout the world? Open coasts await us, hundreds of thousands will welcome us. The influences of a common language, ancestry and institutions have chained together the links of our supremacy around the world, and made of it an inseparable girdle. Shall we falter now, when nature again challenges our mind to quell her hostility, opposing her impediments of sense to our invisible treasuries of thought, invention and self-confidence? It is a new step—our best step,—in the march of human liberty. We need to be divorced from the material constants, amid which the long fought battle for free thought and action has been waged. We are yet entangled in the meshes of tradition, the stumbling blocks of convention—and now they are shattered. We rise to splendid hopes. Or shall we say it is retribution, it is punishment for many sins. Let it be so. A chastened pride will not hurt us, nor will it hurt our chances.”

“Yes, Leacraft,” interrupted Thomsen, “I feel better to hear you talk this way, but I must look at some very disagreeable facts, too. They are not210 easily eliminated by words or fancies, and even seem to evince a provoking facility to become more numerous, the more they are considered. Take the mechanical problem of transportation. We are some forty millions of people. The extravagant powers of assimilation of the United States barely digests the one million of emigrants that come to their shores each year; what conceivable powers of absorption will dispose of our forty millions without an attack of industrial gastritis that will induce the worst political convulsions. And the carrying skill and capacity of our whole merchant marine cannot in less than ten years take away this monstrous human cargo, together with all the colossal accumulation of paraphernalia, stocks, chattels, goods, treasures, books and belongings, that have gathered in this rich island, until they seem like a sort of pactolian alluvium that is indigenous and irremovable. Think of the women, the children! What method of domiciliation will you devise to accommodate these armies? And with this removal comes the crash of all domestic values, railroad stock, gas stock, mill stock, warehouses, land values, everything goes with the removal of the human vitality that gives them worth. It staggers the imagination to think how the disorganization radiates and increases in all directions. In 1905–6 this Great Britain consumed in one industry alone nearly four millions of bales of cotton, spun211 them out into merchantable goods on her fifty million spindles. Do you measure the almost unfathomable depths of distress the stoppage of this one industry means? Is it not better to fight it out here, to defeat Nature, if I may be allowed to copy your own enthusiasm, to put on our own heads the regalia of the Ice King, and rule him, wrest from him his own sceptre, and excel his power with the power of this new century of invention?”

“Impossible.” Leacraft’s retort was quick and impetuous. “Impossible. No expedients of man overcome the deliberate intentions of Nature. We utilize her forces, but we may not deflect her purposes. It is the voice of that very science which has made us such powerful masters of her utilities that now tells us: We must go. To quote the words of Prof. Darwin, spoken at the Cape Town meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, ‘Stability is further a property of relationship to surrounding conditions; it denotes adaptation to environment’; there can be no adaptation to this new environment, which will retain our former greatness. Nature opposes us, indeed, in forcing us away, but we thwart her niggardliness by subterfuge and endurance and courage. We can make her plastic enough for our purposes if we do not overstep the limits of her last negation. The practical question, the panic, the loss! Ah! Well, if all should be as it has been,212 if the inequalities still remained, the very moral significance and regeneration which I hope for could not come. It means the levelling process by which the New Brotherhood is visibly and violently enforced. And as to place and means, thousands upon thousands will establish themselves in America, blessing every community they enter, and being blessed in turn with opportunity. Australia and South Africa, and Canada, with millions upon millions of square miles of unused land, will furnish us with new homes. Revivification, regeneration, rehabilitation will be rapid. We shall not see its final outcome, but we shall know the virile impulse of self help at its inception. If social differences, if social pageantry, vanish, the constraining push of Christian tolerance and fellowship succeeds. Differences may emerge later, but they will be differences of endowment and industrious energy; no other. And as to the transportation problem, it can be solved. We should not all go at once. It may be a slow movement; perhaps the slower the better. But see how we become unified. Like refugees or shipwrecked outcasts, we shall help each other, and every man’s hand will help his neighbor, but also we shall organize on the basis of each man’s aptitude; the farmer to his ploughshare, the mechanic to his workshop, the preacher to his pulpit, the artist to his easel, the banker to his counting room; at last, an ideal assortment213 of talents.”

Thomsen hid a slight yawn, and made a smile of incredulity serve the ends of a salutation of encouragement. “There’s no denying the contagion of your confidence, Leacraft, but really I think that we are all mournfully in the dark as to what we best can do; and in the meanwhile it’s a matter of positive terror what we are going to live on. I brought all the available cash I could for Ethel and myself, but already famine has unfurled its banners, and you know how cramped and shrunk our living has become in London. The Thames alone saves us from starvation. It’s no longer a question of having a bank balance, but the more definite and fundamental one of finding something to buy.

“By the by, Balfour closes the debate at ten to-night. You have admission to the gallery of the Commons. Let us go down. It promises to be a fine effort. I only hope it’s not going to be a funeral oration.”

Leacraft pulled out his watch and found the time a half-hour after nine. Yes, he would go; in fact he had already engaged a boatman at Blackfriars’ Bridge, to be in waiting for him at almost that very moment. Jim stepped to the window and looked out. The night was pure and clear. Huge hummocks of snow encumbered the streets below, and the moon blazed in the keen sky like some target of disaster.

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“Weel, Mr. Leacraft, you won’t want me along, and somehow I’d rather sit here and think over your own words, little as I believe it will all come oot so gude-like.”

“No, Jim, keep the fire on, and watch out for us, and you might remember to brew us a stiff snack after your own heart; it won’t come amiss.” Jim assented with alacrity, and Leacraft and Mr. Thomsen, muffled up to their ears, and almost hermetically enclosed in fur ulsters, left the room, descended the stairs, and appeared at the doorway on the street. A tolerable path led through a part of Cheapside, but it was not their intention to follow that thoroughfare; they turned towards the church and clambered along a devious footway, that imitated the sinuous and irregular wanderings of a mountain trail. It led them to Ludgate Hill, where they encountered a few other travellers like themselves making their way to the bridge for the same purpose. Bridge street was just passable, and soon the ice-laden waters of the river were seen, blazoned like some spectacle of enchantment in the deluge of argent light. They found the boatman in the basement of the Hotel Royal, which was dead, to the last stories of its ornamented facade, silent and dark. It was a part of the indications that London already had lost its visitors. The barge men stole out of their retreat, and Leacraft and Thomsen followed them, the shadows of the party printed in ink215 on the winnowed snow. Two men accompanied the boat; one rowed and the other stood at the prow, pushing off the cakes of ice, and correcting the passage of the boat through the lanes of water, flowing like limpid threads of molten silver between the crunching and veering floes. Leacraft and Thomsen watched with fascinated eyes the broad terrace of the Victoria Embankment, illuminated with the moon’s effulgence, whose unchecked glory met a feeble rivalry in a few sickly gas mantels, and a solitary electric lamp. The noble houses of legislation—and to the eyes of Leacraft they never seemed more imbued with a supremely delicate and elevating beauty—rose from the water’s edge, like some creation of an inspired dreamer, woven of splintered rays of light, with pencilled lines of ebony filched from the darkest night. It embodied a loveliness past even the powers of thought to measure or describe. The houses flamed with light, and the strong light on the clock tower, announced the sitting of Parliament, sent back to the moon a terrestrial radiance, that resembled the pulsations of a fallen star. As they passed the Westminster Bridge, their eyes caught the distant lights of Lambeth Palace. Both knew that to-night the King dined with the Archbishop.

Slowly their boat drew near the landing, and the two men who guided it motioned to its occupants to get ready to disembark, as the landing was deprived216 of its usual outfit, owing to the clogging cakes of ice which clung to the wall. The heavy nose of the boat was pushed into the wall, and Leacraft and Thomsen scrambled up the steps, and gained the walk which led to the Victoria Arch, and the entrance of the Parliament House. Here a jam was encountered, and the news was soon learned that Balfour had begun his speech an hour before the announced time, and was now engaged in the closing appeal on the motion before the house.

And what was this motion? To explain it, it is necessary to rehearse some of the preceding events, which had finally eventuated in this most marvellous situation; a debate in the House of Parliament as to whether the English people should evacuate England. This momentous and world-moving spectacle was now actually contemplated by the fixed attention of every nation on the earth. Its awful solemnity, the convulsing pathos of it, the immense commercial dislocation it involved, its social agony, the calamitous doubts it summoned as to the stability of Europe itself, and the fiercer sudden question of the meaning of human existence on this planet, it aroused, made the debate of the English Parliament then pending the most extraordinary discussion ever known in human annals.

The occasion for it had practically been forced or precipitated by the coercive power of scientific opinion. And the curious thing about this same217 scientific opinion was that it first resisted the overwhelming proof of the subsidence of the isthmus and the elevation of the Caribbean wall of transgression, and then fervently accepted it, with not one scintilla more of demonstration, and in accepting it proposed for itself the unwelcome task of convincing the English people that they should evacuate their country.

It would be hard to conceive of anything to the English mind less conceivable than such a desertion. Its mere mention raised the most violent denunciation and poured a torrent of abuse upon the unfortunate advisors. The thought of it sapped the very foundations of the English sense of existence. It seemed the vertigo of madness. It deranged the most obvious assertions of common sense. It was an impeachment of the English reality. To think of it was a betrayal of trust, a breach of faith, a succinct defiance of the Almighty, a blasphemous rejection of the lessons of history, a timorous surrender to the threats of the weather.

But later, when the Scottish population began to throw its inundating tides of people into England, and the Englishman read at his breakfast table of the floes of ice in the Clyde, and the buried Grampians, the insurmountable drifts about Stirling, and the incipient neve masses on Scuir-na-Gillean, in Skye, the reluctant embarkation of the merchants of Aberdeen, the closing of its great University, the218 shrinkage of business in Glasgow; when they realized that in truth the Atlantic and Pacific oceans had become united by a broad gateway through which the Gulf Stream, which erstwhile transported the heat of the equator to Europe, now emptied its torrid waters, bathing the western coasts of North America as far north as Alaska, and bringing to that Arctic country almost the same blessing of fructifying warmth with which it had before endowed England; when still further they began to hear, and to realize, by private letters, the affectionate summons and offers of the colonies, the overwhelming loyalty of the brothers across the sea, their frenzied eagerness to place their lands almost gratuitously in the hands of the mother people, and assume towards them the role of honored beneficiaries, then a strange, unwonted wondering began, as to whether it might not be best to look into the matter. And then intelligence aroused, with continued inspection, the impression grew, that indeed the prospects were alarming. The English mind, once startled in a certain direction, soon takes on an impetus proportionate to the inertia of its first movements, and therefore by a natural law of psychology and mechanics gains in accelerated velocity with each succeeding moment. So it was now. The industry of the scientific propaganda, its inventive persistency, was followed by the conversion of the large financial and commercial interests,219 and then a panic seized the great masses of the nation. Parliament took it up, the papers bulged and teemed with information, discussion, advice, and reports. A determining influence with the large trading classes was the decline, in some instances the positive disappearance of business, while to others not chained in insular possessions, a new world of adventure and chance seemed not altogether undesirable.

The pressure of popular approval hastened, in the Parliament, the formulation of a plan for the slow and careful removal of the population. The Law of Exodus, as it was termed, was a thoroughly English legislative work. And that meant a wise, adequate and deliberate evacuation. It involved a re-tabulation, so to speak, of the wealth and occupations of the individuals of the country, and so adjusted their departure, their association, their duties, their facilities and trades, that the least competition would arise in the new quarters, and then they were also so distributed in the colonies, that they met the requirements of these, as it was ascertained, from the authorities, the latter demanded. Thousands upon thousands had already sailed away, forming for themselves combinations as their acquaintances and connexions permitted, and still other thousands, with property invested abroad made a home in the land in which their support lay. A singular consequence of the situation was220 the speculative gale it produced in America, where large amounts of unemployed or released capital took flight. It settled tumultuously in Wall Street, voraciously attacking every variety of security, and driving stock values out of sight in a tremendous boom that disconcerted the tried veterans of the famous mart.

All the time the Londoner was himself gaining some convincing insight into the dread nature of the climatic change about him. The snows covered the greater part of the streets of London, the parks became desolate tracts, deserted, uncleared, unused, swept over by the freezing winds, and chased from end to end with buffeted wreaths of snow, whose ghostly swirling columns ran over the wintry exposures like a race of Titanic spirits, crossing each other in cyclonic confusion, or meeting in shivering collisions, dissolving in cloud-bursts of microscopic and penetrating needles of ice. The Thames was almost closed, the shipping stayed idle at the wharfs, almost unmitigated suffering spread among the poor, for miles the streets were only traversed by foot-paths worn by their occupants, and the strangest sights occurred in the smaller reservations like Lincoln Inn Fields, St. Paul’s Churchyard, the Temple Gardens, the Artillery Grounds, Finsbury Circus and other confined spaces. By a freak of circumstances, and the curious and entirely unexpected vagary of the winds, the snow piled up221 and up in these quarters, because of a peculiar inrush of wind from the converging streets around, and this sweeping effect continued until the mound of snow, circumvallating the buildings, reached to their windows or overtopped them, while in enclosures not pre-empted by buildings, as Highbury Fields, and the various cemeteries, the hills of snow formed colossal billows, which seemed like a phalanx of rigid waves tortured into fantastic pinnacles by the storms of wind. Such spectacles turned back the life-blood of the bravest, and converted the most recalcitrant objectors to the new view of the necessity of leaving the immemorial splendors of England’s Capital.

It was a demoralizing and distressing picture of change, to visit the great docks on the Thames; the London docks, the Commercial and the West India docks, and in the place of the varied throngs, the miscellaneous rabble of laborers in which the forms, faces and even the dresses of the people of the world made a composite aggregate, which was a suggested reflex of the myriad-handed toil and industry of London, a significant hint of the immense wealth and opulent indulgence of the great metropolis—in place of all this, the harsh winds whistled over deserted yards, shrieked through the rigging of idle ships, or blew tempestuous volleys of rime and sleet across the river between Wapping and Rotherhithe. Before this awful change, English222 fortitude and confidence quailed, or wrapping itself in the reserve of bitterness and distrust, turned silently away, for an instant, at least, driven to confess that the time-honored legend of English destiny had become a perverted and silly shibboleth.

February 12th, which has in meteorology, along with the twelfths of November, May and August, been isolated as the period of the ice saints, viz.: four periods characterized in an unaccountable manner by a fall in temperature—this 12th of February, 1910, had been determined by the Parliament for the closing of the great debate on the Motion of Evacuation. It was this night that Leacraft and Thomsen found so clear and cold, a keen and perilous intensity of cold probably never before experienced in the English islands, unless one, in his inenviable task of comparison could have found an equivalent in the Ice Age itself.

When Leacraft and his companion attained the Victoria Tower, already the debate, on the motion which in an enlarged way had been before the English nation for more than a month, had reached its final stage. Balfour had been chosen to close, in a long peroration, the tremendous forensic display which had been limited to the walls of the Houses of Parliament. But it was only an episodic and distinguished incident in an argument which had convulsed every household in England, which had sent its clamorous assertions and appeals to the whole223 English-speaking people throughout the world, and which would, by all rational expectations, remain to the end of historic time the most startling venture in language, the most dramatic performance in oratory ever known.

The two men hurried in, past the flaming chandeliers of the beautiful archway. Upon Leacraft showing his particular cards of admission, an attendant escorted them through the Royal Gallery, the House of Peers, the Peers’ Lobby, all of which were deserted. They chased in most indecorous fashion through the marvellous rooms, only intent upon catching the last words of the great speech whose purport and end was to empty those glorious apartments of their human interest, and bring expatriation upon all the memories they harbored. They passed through the Central Hall, the Commons’ Lobby, the Division Lobby, and were expeditiously inserted in the Reporters’ Gallery, where, backed up against the topmost wall, they surveyed the thronged mass beneath them. Every inch of space, every point of observation was packed, and the scene, on which a softened flood of light fell, with an enhancing effect of wonder, was eloquent in picturesque power and interest. Lords and ladies—to-night no interfering screen concealed the women—earls, dukes, baronets, the clergy, even bishops in their robes, merchants, men of science, bankers, and the whole House of Peers, standing at224 the bar of the House of Commons, were arrayed in a vast and irrelevant assemblage, pierced by one thought, the anguish of a supreme decision. And Balfour!

Upon an erect and stalwart figure, moved by an instinct of regnancy at this sublime instant to stand free of his compeers in the broad way, between the benches of the Government and those of the Opposition, and facing the speaker—all the eyes of that assemblage were riveted. The classic sentences of Macaulay in describing the trial of Warren Hastings—hackneyed as they are by innumerable repetitions—might well apply to this unwonted and intense spectacle; “the long galleries were crowded by an audience such as has rarely excited the fears or the emulations of an orator. There were gathered together from all parts of a great, free, enlightened and prosperous empire, grace and female loveliness and learning, the representatives of every science and every art.” And the comparison can be illuminatively emphasized. At the trial of the illustrious Pro-consul, curiosity in a man, sympathy with a race, admiration for the local splendor of a gorgeous scene, summoned to the hall of William Rufus the resplendent galaxy. But the motives were objective. In the present case, thought Leacraft, how pathetic, how tragic their subjective force. It was as if the children of a home, about to disappear in some horrible engulfment, calmly prepared225 to leave its threshold, but it was that sorrow multiplied by all the individuals of a nation, and magnified by the moral surrender of the associations of two thousand years. A nervous tension, that was expressed in the almost petrified stare of some faces, the startling pallor of others, the half-open lips, the strained attitudes, the involuntary shudders, the curious grieved looks of inattention, overmastered the assembly. Its contagious thrill seized Leacraft, and brought his mental receptivity up to a quickened pitch of almost deranged alertness, while every sense seemed preternaturally awake.

He heard a woman sob somewhere in front of him, and far down the left gallery, in the glare and glitter, he saw a noble head, white-haired, but still wearing the flush of manhood’s prime upon his cheeks, leaning on a hand, and turned towards him, with unchecked tears coursing silently from its upraised eyes; he saw a little girl clasping the neck of her mother and father, as she sat half on the laps of each, and heard the soft lisp of her kisses on their brows; he saw the almost saturnine face of a dowager stonily gazing at the speaker, and, most strangely, he detected on her finger a topaz ring cut in relievo with the head of Queen Victoria; and yet, while his senses reported these trifles with startling keenness, they were also all enlisted in catching every gesture, every movement, every accent226 of the man whose plastic power of eloquence was there engaged in pleading for English abdication.

How the words rang in his ears, how persuasively the voice sank and rose, and with what a soaring melody some of the cadences seemed to linger in the scented air. “Let us,” it said, “bow before the revelation of our own destiny. The ordination of Nature is the express reflection—nay, it is the objective expression of Divine will. Accept it with submission, with the subserviency of faith, and act on that condition with the abundance of that native resolution that from the time of Alfred has made our path upward, outward, onward.

“I do not, sir, under-estimate the tremendous ordeal; I cannot be blind to the colossal undertaking. It resumes in one herculean exertion, all the efforts of our race through two thousand years. It is without precedent, or else it shall only be reverently compared to the exodus of the Children of God from Egypt. And in that light, sir, without subterfuge or apology, without extenuation of rhetoric, without ribaldry or vanity, I do regard it. We are solemnized by some vast scheme in the order of things to carry with us the genius of our civilization to another home, where its power and beauty shall both benefit others, and become themselves more powerful and more beautiful. We have lived through a stadium of progress and achievement.227 We certainly advance to the opening of another. Let the gathered multitudes of our race, here at its ancestral hearth, gird up their loins and accept the august command to go forth.

“From the Witan of the Angles and the Saxons, through a feudal hierarchy to Magna Charta, through the provisions of Oxford, the Model Parliament of Edward I., by the rise in political privileges by the Towns, by Merchant gild and Craft gild, by the Good Parliament of 1376, by the relentless rebukes of Richard in the Merciless Parliament, by reason of popular censure and the eloquence of common men as with John Ball and the revolts of 1380, in the insurrection of Wat Tyler—followed as it was by shameless, mad ventures—through Wickliff, by the glories of the Tudors, the overthrow of the Stuarts, by Pym, Hampden, Cromwell, by William of Orange, by parliamentary reform and legislative extension—from the first glimmerings of civic life, to the light of the modern day, this nation has grown in strength, in reason, in the deliberate purpose of holding even the scales of Justice.

“But, sir, with new positions, new prospects, new opportunities in illimitable areas of expansion, we enter upon undreamed of material enlargements. A greater London will, in the coming centuries appear, in which through the phase of exaltation we shall assume, will be seen the Miracle of Time, in228 which all we have learned, the highest technical skill, our loftiest constructive, creative mind will be realized.

“The social power, the redemptive agencies, the final product of his thought, aspirations, skill, will be incorporated in this City of Man for men—the City of the Future—and it will be ours—all ours—London rediviva, London redux, London sempieterna, et ne plus ultra. A greater England shall be gathered within its walls. It will hold our sanctified patriotism, our emancipated reason, our ennobled, disciplined applied science, the embodyment of our imagination, and to its doors the world will gather, too, in fealty, in trust, in homage.

“‘O et praesidium et dulce decus meum.’”

The voice ceased, the speaker dropped dumbly into his seat, and for an instant, held his hands over features convulsed with feeling. The surprising thing then was—the awful silence, the deadness of that living, throbbing, almost frantic audience, who looking out upon a blackness of uncertainty felt the happy past, radiant with ease and fame, ceremonial and cultured luxury, slipping out of their possession forever, and uttered no sound.

The Speaker of the House rose; there was a shifting of heads, the rustle of turning bodies, a simultaneous orientation, but no other sound, and Leacraft scanned the multitude more. Again the portentous silence; the Speaker with quite unusual229 ardor alluded to the imposing power and beauty of the speech, and put the motion.

And then another thing more astonishing happened, that House of Commons leaped to its feet and shouted in one long, vibrant roar, “Aye! Aye! Aye!” The eager agony of the assemblage then split and tore the proud repression that had almost strangled it. Cry upon cry started from various points, and the clamor grew, the agitation took on the aspect of disorder and panic, and then it resolved itself into thundering cheers for the King, and then, with electrifying unanimity the multitude sang the national anthem.

It was over. The House of Commons had ordered the evacuation of England; the House of Peers would follow their lead, and while that evacuation would take place slowly, covering a long space of time, and permit the recreant forces of nature to reform—if they would—the face of the world as it had been, while it had consideration for all the conflicting interests involved, and was so skillfully framed as to cause the least shock of derangement to the immense business agencies, still it was a surrender of the proudest people on the face of the earth to the blind powers of nature, and it meant for Englishmen a new heaven and a new earth.

Leacraft and Thomsen returned that night to their lodgings at the Bothwell Club, through Pall Mall, where but a few of the clubs were still in action230 and as they moved painfully along over the debris and dirt, the disturbed and shapeless heaps of snow, the abandoned articles of furniture, in front of some houses, and saw the darkened fronts of others, with broken windows, and broached and falling doors, noted the signs of interior commotion in the treasury, the admiralty, the foreign and Indian offices, the war office and the horse guards, they felt that Parliament had already been forestalled, and that the evacuation of London and with it all England had already begun.

Events were moving rapidly. Ever since the Parliament, by a legislative decree, had authorized the desertion of England, and the eventful day approached when the King and his household, the Parliament itself, and the Church and the Titled Estate should, in a formal and expressive manner, leave England’s shores, the mass of the population had been diligently hunting about for refuge and occupation. Steamers and ships had scattered in all directions the fleeing multitudes. Relatives abroad, friends and even acquaintances offered homes and employment, no utility now was too small to be considered, nor any designation too insignificant to merit attention. This scampering was largely among those who felt the pinch already of idleness and the diminishing chance of work, among operatives and workmen, clerks and the232 bread winners of the middle class. The nobleman and the pauper did not stir.

The English nation had decreed through its legislature, that the evacuation of the country should be conducted with pageantry, that the solemn parting should be enrolled in all time honored ceremony and stately pomp with which kings had been crowned, and for which, with all its heart and mind, the English nature cries out with unappeasible hunger. So the moment for the King’s departure, which meant the official desertion of the Old Home, might be justly compared to the flight of the queen bee in the bee colony when her faithful followers swarm after and upon her, and with resolute constancy create a new city about her inviolable person.

The King was to leave England in June, 1910, and when he left with sumptuous and melancholy observance, with splendor of color and depth and power of music, with uniform and ritual, with prayer and chorus and prophecy, with august and intolerable grandeur, with the art of tradition and the ornaments of invention, he was to pass down to Tilbury and sail away beyond Gravesend to the new realm of his possession on the shores of Australia. It was a pretty hard thing to believe; it was a harder thing to do.

But it was to be done with all the gorgeous effectiveness which accumulated traditions of centuries233 and the practice of every day and the mere resources in artifices and equipment of a magnificent realm could display. The day came with splendid beauty, the sun shone over an England which somewhat returned to the flowery loveliness of its olden sweet estate. The city had been cleared, though the snowfalls had reached the most unexpected depth, and the severity of the winter had been appalling. The meteorologists discovered the fact that the western and northwestern zones of extreme precipitation, those of eighty inches had moved inward, and had even exceeded this maximum, and the condition of the country was really extraordinary and desperate. The immense accumulations of snow in the outlying districts had risen to such heights that the low, long houses of the peasantry were covered and the aspect of the country was that of a Labrador landscape transplanted to southern latitudes, where trees, stone walls and villages assumed the place of the more familiar tundra, plains and stone floored plains. Suffering had been very general, and the importunity of nature had done more to convince the people that the necessity of removal was an actual threat, not to be avoided or placated, than the speeches, the tracts of the scientific societies, or the deliberations of statesmen and editors.

But in London, on this twentieth of June, though the air bore the strange traces of the changed climate, in its tingling sharpness, yet this exhilaration234 only served the purpose of adding swiftness to the movement of the hosts of people in the streets, and a new and wonderful tremor of excitement to their eagerness in awaiting the development of the day’s great preparations.

In the morning the King was to be enthroned in Westminster Abbey, and to receive the homage of the Peers, and, as usual at a coronation, the day itself was inaugurated with the firing of a royal salute at sunrise. A measure of the august and overpowering rites and observances that mark the assumption of a King’s rule was now to be gone through with, as a symbol and memento, before the King transferred his throne to another land; and this ceremonial was emblematic of the unbroken allegiance of the English nation to his removed majesty.

The King was to ascend the theatre of the Abbey, and be lifted into His Throne by the Archbishops and Bishops, and other Peers of the kingdom, and being enthronized, or placed therein, all the great officers, those that bear the swords and sceptres, and the rest of the nobles, should stand round about the steps of the throne, and the Archbishop standing before the King should say the exhortation, beginning with the words, “Stand firm, and hold fast from henceforth the Seat of State of Royal and Imperial Dignity, which is this day delivered unto you in the Name and by the Authority of Almighty235 God, and by the hands of Us, the Bishops and Servants of God, though unworthy, etc, etc.”

And then the homage being offered and accepted, the King attended and accompanied, the four swords—being the sword of Mercy, the sword of Justice to the Spirituality, the sword of Justice to the Temporality, and the sword of State—were to be carried before him. He should then descend from his throne crowned, and, carrying his Sceptre and Rod in his hands, should go into the area eastward of the theatre, and pass on through the door on the south side of the altar into King Edward’s Chapel, the organ and other instruments all the while playing.

The King should then, standing before the altar, deliver the Sceptre with the Dove to the Archbishop, who would lay it upon the altar there. The King would then be disrobed of his imperial mantle, and be arrayed in his royal robe of purple velvet, by the Lord Great Chamberlain.

The Archbishop should then place the orb in his majesty’s left hand. Then his majesty should proceed through the choir to the west door of the Abbey, in the same manner as he came, wearing his crown and bearing in his right hand the Sceptre, with the Cross, and in his left the orb; all Peers wearing their coronets, and the Archbishops and Bishops their caps.

The interior arrangements in the Abbey were236 familiar. From the west door where the procession should enter to the screen which divides choir from nave, two rows of galleries were to be erected on each side of the centre aisle—the one gallery level with the vaultings, the other with the summit of the western door. These galleries should have their fronts fluted with crimson cloth richly draped at the top, and decorated with broad golden fringe at the bottom.

On the floor of the centre aisle a slightly raised platform or carpeted way, should be laid down, along which the King and Queen, in procession should pass to the choir. This was to be matted over and covered with crimson cloth. On the pavement of the aisle bordering this carpeted way should stand the soldiery as a fence against interference.

The theatre where the principal parts of the ceremony were to be enacted lies immediately under the central tower of the Abbey, and was a square formed by the intersection of the choir and the transcepts, extending nearly the whole breadth of the choir. On this square a platform was to be erected ascended by five steps. The summit of this platform and also the highest step leading to it, was to be covered with the richest cloth of gold. From that step down to the flooring of the theatre, all was covered with carpet of rich red or purple color bordered with gold. In the centre of the theatre the237 sumptuously draped chair was to be placed for the sovereign, in which he receives the homage of the Peers.

This interior pomp and splendor escaped the observation of Leacraft, though he was not unfamiliar with the details of the solemn pageant, but now it hardly interested him. His mind by a natural emancipation from the thrall of such spectacles, dwelt rather on the attitude of the people in this extreme peril and solicitude. He felt inquisitive to learn their feelings, their hopes, their cohesiveness in the changed estate. Were they likely to resolve into a chaos of preferences with only the cry of sauve qui peut in their mouths, or would they follow the new destinies, and preserve the nation. At length the populace were coming into their own. It was pretty evident that a King and Queen and Regalia, and Peers, and Peeresses, and a much surpliced Clergy, would not make a nation, without the workers, the rent payers, the men of action, the bread winners, the clerks, artisans, and merchants, the householder and his family, and that the sacred classes would be suddenly subjected to a reductio ad absurdum, if they formed the only inhabitants of the new regime and their titles lost their raison d’etre with the disappearance of the untitled mass.

After the rendering of the Homage at the Abbey, the Procession was to take place, and the King arriving238 at Tilbury, with the royal family, a selection of the Peers, the highest Episcopal prelates, and certain representative men from the Commons, including the Ministry, would be received on the Dreadnought, and with a glorious escort of the largest battleships, carrying the royal equipage, the furniture of Windsor Castle, and of St. James palace, and of the Buckingham mansion, the archives of the Parliament, at least a portion, steam away from England to Australia, to Melbourne. This Nucleus of Government holding the inseparable insignia, and the actual essence of the English nation would there, with pomp and solemn allegations, with rolling music and pious prayers, with thunders of the guns by the Navy, and the salute of the Army, be as it were reinstalled.

But the route of the procession was not to be straight out of London. It comprised a broader purpose. It was proposed to circumvallate London, to impregnate it with the sentiment of the King’s leaving. It should be traversed and penetrated in all directions, gathering thus the public allegiance, and absorbing its loyalty, shedding the effulgence of the royal splendor upon the populace, and enchaining them anew to the principle and fact of English Sovreignty. It was a stupendous project. It involved stations and relays. Camps of the military were to be established at St. James Park, at Victoria Park, at Regent’s Park, at the West End239 near Paddington, at Wormwood Scrubs, and in the southern districts around Clapham Common and towards Putney.

The King was to stop at resting places, and in the largest local churches, a reduced form of the Homage was to be instituted involving the enthronization, with the displays of the Regalia, and the jubilation, and the reverence of the people expressed, as always in the shouts—

The bells of the churches were to ring, the houses were to hang out their banners, flags were to cover the streets, bands stationed on prominent balconies, at points covering the entire long journey through and around the city, were to play national airs, that so there might be generated an overwhelming enthusiasm, a tumult of devotion, and thus constrain the Englishman afresh in the religion of the nation’s immortality.

It was finely conceived, this elevation of the King. It was gorgeously executed. The imagination of the people was tremendously impressed, and the Ark of the Covenant of the eternal supremacy of the English crown seemed thus visibly incorporated, and presented to them. The procession was glittering, and it was majestic. It ponderously emphasized the English idea. There were really240 two processions, the first from Westminster to Buckingham Palace, the second through London. In the first—the King issued from Westminster, his crown borne before him, but holding in his right hand the Sceptre with the Cross, and in his left the Orb. Then began the most wonderful State ride through London. The superb chariot of the King surrounded by heralds, kings at arms, pursuivants, with judges, councillors, lords, and dignitaries, was followed by the open carriages of the nobility.

The King was immersed in color. Garter—principal King-at-arms—was a miracle of dress. He wore a frock or tabard, crimson and gold emblazoned with the quarters of the United Kingdom. Then there was the Clarencieux of the South, and Norroy of the North—and the heralds of Lancaster, Somerset, Richmond, all wonderfully bedight, and the pursuivants—Rouge Croix, Rouge Dragon, Portcullis, and Blue Mantel—looking like the genii of a Christmas pantomime. And here with the King were the Lord Chamberlain, the Lord Steward, and the Master of the Horse. And there followed this cavalcade, surrounding the King like a many colored fringe, the carriages of the nobles wherein all the signs of degree, order, rank, were sumptuously shown. Here the robes of the Peers, crimson velvet edged with miniver—the capes furred with the same—and powdered with bars or rows of ermine, according to degree, rolled together241 in a bank of oscillating glory. Beneath the mantles a court dress, a uniform, or regimentals were descried. The coronets were even worn, and as the scintillating groups passed, eager admirers separated the coronet of the baron with its six silver equidistant balls, from the coronet of a viscount with sixteen, from the coronet of an earl with eight balls raised on points, and with glistening gold strawberry leaves between the points, from the coronet of a marquis with four gold strawberry leaves alternating with four silver balls, and from the coronet of a duke with the eight gold strawberry leaves.

Nor did beauty hesitate to add its witchery to the sports of splendor, and in behalf of that ancient idea of Monarchy, which now was enlisted against a deep peril of mistrust and repudiation. The Peeresses formed part of the procession. Their scarlet kirtles over the petticoats of white satin and lace, their flowing sleeves slashed and furred, their cushioned trains heaped in confusion in the carriages, and relieved by shining plaques of silver silk, were still more bewilderingly graced by jewelry, by oceans of gems resplendently transfigured in the blazing sun. In this momentous pageant the limits of the spectacular were invaded, even distended, in which some saw not only a lack of good taste, but the pressure of a little fear.

Even the church advanced the bold bid for admiration242 and wonder. It sent out its archbishops, bishops, rectors, canons, prebendaries and deacons, to compose parts of the vast exhibit to be interwoven in the variegated human carpet that filled the streets. Before the churches that were passed, choirs gathered and sang melodiously; the strong religious fibre of the English men and women was sedulously appealed to, or else it was the elemental flaming forward of their powerful conviction. At this strange moment there was less of pretence and trick than sincerity. The heart of the people was steadfastly united with the old traditions; they clung unbrokenly to the inheritance of English greatness. There was no reason to doubt their faith.

The route of the second marvellous procession was from the Abbey through Bird Cage Walk past Victoria monument to Procession road, to the Strand, to Fleet street, over Ludgate hill, past St. Paul’s, to Cheapside, to Bishops street, to Shoreditch, to Hackney street, and so out to Victoria Park and Homerton. Back again to Highbury Fields, south by Essex road to Pentonville road, to Euston road, to Marylebone road, through Regents Park, through Hampstead road to Hampstead, to West Side, through Edgeware road to Hyde Park, and the Bays water to Holland park, to Hammersmith road, by Hammersmith bridge road to Castelnau; thence to Putney, to Battersea, to Clapham,243 to Camberwell, thence to Walworth road, by London road, by Waterloo road to Westminster bridge, to the Houses of Parliament, and on the banks of the river Thames to the Tower, and on through White Chapel, Mile End road, Bow road, to Bromley, to Stratford, to Barking, to Tilbury.

Nothing so prodigious had ever been conceived; and the resources of the empire, of the military, and the squadrons of the colonists, who should again, as at the Jubilee of Queen Victoria, present the diversified elements of English power, would be involved.

At Tilbury on the Essex bank, opposite Gravesend, where rise the low bastions of Tilbury Fort, originally constructed by Henry III, King Edward the VII, would in a fashion diverse, and with a different end in view, also declare that he “had the heart and stomach of a King, and of a King of England too,” as had said Queen Elizabeth. But now it should be said by a King unappalled by the invasion of the powers of the air, as she was before the power of Spain, but now said with undiminished confidence and high hope, though said too with obedience to the supreme mandate of expulsion.

Before it took place, Leacraft and Thomsen began their long walk from Ludgate hill, and Leacraft intently watched the street crowds. He noted also with recording interest the groups in the balconies with lunch baskets. The expectant air everywhere244 was not unnoticeably mingled with a kind of frightened silence. There was not much noise, no indiscriminate hubbub in the streets, and where groups were encountered, hurrying to their destination, they were quiet and restrained. Tension was evident, a high strung expectancy verging with impalpable approach upon tears, and the agony of penitential promises. The fundamentally religious optimism of the Englishman was confounded, and his acceptance of invisible guidance made itself seen in faces desolated by the grief of tears.

The preparations were remarkable and elaborate. The windows were filled with chairs. Platforms were erected, almost luxuriously draped with red cloth and scarlet velvet, and surging crowds in spots seemed to bely the significance of the portentous moment. From time to time as the two observers walked in the middle of the street, they stopped reluctantly to notice signs of mourning. These took on the form of trailing streamers of crape, hung upon white cloth and their singularity amid the almost bombastic surplusage of scarlet dressings, awoke protest and resentment. At one point there was a particularly conspicuous dismal challenge to the susceptibilities of the spectators in a balcony loaded with sombre trappings which gained a startling prominence because of the patriotic and cheerful decorations on either side of it. Before this lugubrious appeal a small group of malcontents245 had gathered, and were indulging in incendiary criticism.

“Hits no use turning a sour face to the thing. What’s got to be, is got to be, and a little heart will keep a sour stomach from making itself sick. Hi say we’re hall in the same boat, and cheerfulness makes pleasant company. Such a show as that hought not to be tolerated, Hi say.” This belligerency came from the thick lips of a red faced man, who had his coat over his arm, and whose leathern leggings, corduroy knee breeches, and flaming weskit with a high collar strapped to his muscular neck by a pea green scarf, betokened a representative of the “fancy,” or an ostler turned out for a day’s holiday.

“Indeed I think so,” squealed a thin, short man with a red nose and a curious habit of wiping his mouth with a yellow handkerchief. “It’s hard enough for the sufferin’ masses to leave hearth, home, and, I may say, family, not to be saddened more’n than is natural with these funereal suggestions.”

“Well,” shouted a sturdy arrival on the other limit of the circle; “Let’s tear them down. The quickest way to cure trouble is to git rid of it. It’s rotten insultin’ to stick those weeds under our noses.” Under the influence of these defiant words the knot of men moved towards the objectionable drapery with evidently unfriendly intentions.246 But they had not been unobserved from the inside of the house on whose front these sad reminders hung. A window shot up and a tall slender woman advanced to the edge of the balcony. She was dressed deeply in black, her neck was surrounded by some white crepe stuff, and the sentiment, as Howells has it, of her dress was a pathetic suggestion of bereavement and misfortune. Her hair, yet luxuriant, was plentifully sprinkled with gray; her face had the authorized look of nobility and distinction. She was yet prepossessing, though the crowding years had brought her past middle life. The distinctive impression she made upon Leacraft, as he and Thomsen, somewhat withdrawn, watched the denouement of this street episode, was that of abiding sorrow, patiently borne, and doubtless united in her, with Christian resignation and unsullied piety. A beautiful picture of the English woman, who resolutely lives her earnest life of prayer and self-sacrifice, holding intensely to her heart some fond memory, wreathed in amaranth. And Leacraft, as an Englishman, blessed Providence there were such. The men on the street were a little abashed by the pale face and lofty mien of the lady who had recognized their purpose, and placed herself there to thwart it.

She came forward and instantly spoke; her voice was excessively clear, but an underlying mellowness247 imparted an extreme sweetness to its tones.

“My friends you wish these mourning signs taken away. They offend you. But when you know that they express to me the approaching loss of all my friends, you will not, I think, feel so harshly about them. The King, in a week, leaves the shores of England—the evacuation of England begins to-day—and with the King goes the great English nation and this wonderful city with all its memories, with its beauty, its historic power, its incessant interest, our common home for all our lifetimes, will dwindle and dwindle and disappear, lost in arctic snows and ice, at least so they tell us.

“But I shall stay. In this house suffering has come to me; it has never left me. I shall not leave it. I mourn for those who in going away die to English pride, to English love, to English devotion, and”—she leaned out over the sullen men beneath her—“and die to me. These black films are for them.”

She stopped. The men, worried and puzzled and surprised, looked a little sheepishly at each other.

“Oh, well,” said he of the hostler type, “my leddy, no offense, seein’ how you feel about it. Hi say—’ave your way.”

“Yes, yes,” squealed the preacher, “if the empty badges of mournin’ give ennyone—ennyone—satisfaction, why it’s not in reason to question their motives in this excroociating moment.”

248

“Gad! the lady’s right,” shouted the former belligerent, whose prompt hint had at first nearly precipitated the riot, “She’s got the right ring—and I’m damned if anyone teches the rags there I’ll bust his cock-eyed head aff his shoulders.”

This vociferous statement produced a hubbub of approval, and won many distinct admissions of entire acquiescence—and with these reassuring murmurs the lady retired, after telling her thanks, and the gathering withdrew down the street.

Leacraft and Thomsen continued their way westward. Before them suddenly, after a half-hour’s sauntering, shone an avenue of military splendor. They were in Charing Cross, having pushed down the Strand, and they were on the south side of Trafalgar Square, and not far from the equestrian statue of Charles I. Trafalgar Square was filled with troops. The effect of color was transporting. The massed regiments of infantry were broken by parks of artillery, while immediately under Nelson’s column the Nineteenth Hussars—the “Dumpies of 1759,” the Fifteenth Hussars—“Elliott’s Light Horse,” the Sixteenth Lancers—“the Queen’s,” and the Thirteenth Hussars—“the ragged brigade”—were confusedly stationed, their mingling busbies and dependent bags looking like a garden patch.

From point to point issued galloping videttes, carrying their pennants on lance-heads affixed to249 the stirrups, which undulated in the air, as the horses pranced and caracolled. The tramp of troops, the sighing of bugles, and the resounding surges of music, surrounded them. It was afternoon. The beginning of the first day’s procession from the Abbey doubtless was at hand. The stirring air communicated the thrills of an immense event, and the people, petrified into attention, stood crushed against each other in rows of forlorn expectancy. The suffocating excitement was unbearable, the more so because of its immobility. Leacraft decided to rush through London, and reach Victoria Park, the Hackney Marshes and Clapton, in order to determine the attitude, the action, of the poorer classes. Thomsen was unwilling to desert the fermenting throngs around Trafalgar Square, or miss, for a moment, the kaleidoscope of changing soldiery, and so Leacraft, leaving him, entered a hansom and shot off.

He was not averse to this solitude. His affections for Miss Tobit had lately warmed into a less indifferent kindliness, and he began to feel a gnawing anxiety lest the pretty Scotch woman thought less of him—in the way lovers like—than she did of her cousin, the handsome and obnoxiously unconcerned Thomsen. Thomsen knew exactly Leacraft’s feelings, and regarded them with unconcealed forbearance, and—what was more provoking—with a frank condescension of sympathy. And250 yet the men had become good friends; they had talked long and seriously, with all the elements of critical guidance they could summon, about the strange reversal or revolution in the nation’s affairs. But at these moments they were in an impersonal frame of contact, and the personal exigencies which later crept between them, were all absent. Leacraft’s intellectual weight easily made itself felt in these discussions, and Thomsen, with cordial alacrity, assumed the obedient position of audience and pupil.

As Leacraft was driven eastward in the swinging vehicle, he flung himself against its cushions, and again thought of the monstrous and incredible metamorphosis in the fortunes of his people. The vigorous life of ten centuries, with all its memories, the heaped up riches of its achievements, the splendid literary legacy of the past, with its art, its lineaments of beauty, its dusky shadows, the solicitous charm of its contrasted periods of history, the deep encrustation, nay, rather, the unfathomable deposits of character, and accomplishment which overlaid the Kingdom of England, and, in this city of London, the beating heart of its vast interests, thickly choked each avenue and current of its life—to abandon all this at the summons of a temperatural caprice, at the tempestuous whim of an earthquake, before the blind violence of frost and snow and ice, was the most unendurable of humiliations!251 It bit too deeply at the generalized assumption of the whole world, that man ruled the earth; it soured the contentment of his avid vanity, and to the Englishman it assailed the hitherto impregnable fortress of his heroic conceit. And yet—the old dream of a greater England arose, as it had arisen a hundred times before, in all these troubling and disconcerting months—an England leaping forward, as an exultant youth, bearing in his hands the trophies of new and brighter conquests, flushed under changed environments, with the inspiration of new ambitions, and new powers of creation, issuing into a greater chapter of human growth than had ever before been conceived or written.

And yet what an eviction! This glorious old England, with its sweet homes, its innumerable beauties, its convincing happiness of downs and glade and gardens, flowering into clouds of blossoms, its lakes, its gentle streams, its æsthetic softness and dimness, its manifold and opulent charm of landscape, the hurrying and constant kisses of its moist skies, in league with all the graces of the seasons—to cast this aside, and begin again, elsewhere, in regions drear and sterile of all these things; ah! that was too hard! too hard! and, as he had often done, Leacraft covered his face with his hands and sobbed.

Amid these fluctuating thoughts and feelings, the hansom swung with vehement oscillations along252 the streets, in the more deserted parts of London, and brought its occupant in sight of the Bethnal Green Museum, from which a diversion along Old Ford Road and Approach Road, flung him into Victoria Park, the huge playground of the poorer eastern section of the city. He was driven to the eastern part of the immense reservation, and was gratified to find a public meeting in progress, the exact thing he most wished to be present at, and to estimate.

In a broad and treeless area of the park, with the grass showing hesitatingly after the long winter, but vivid also in spots, in the strong light of the afternoon, with an atmosphere strangely variant from the traditional, and, to Leacraft, much loved velvety softness and mellowed obscuration of former days, were gathered a multitude of people. They surrounded a speaker, who, on some sort of improvised platform, with a knot of associated leaders, with a swaying body and occasionally outstretched hands, was engaged in a harangue which was received with attention unattended by the slightest demonstration of assent or disapproval. It looked from a short distance almost like a devotional assembly, it seemed so reverently silent, and as Leacraft approached, this impression was partially at least verified, for the speaker’s hands ceased their agitated appeal, the occasional higher cries proceeding from his lips died away, and a253 song or hymn burst suddenly from the still motionless multitude. It lasted for an instant, perhaps a single verse, and as Leacraft drew near, another man from the platform group stood up, and stepped to the front of the small stand. At that precise moment the cannonading, agreed upon as a signal, announced the starting of the royal cortege, and the sad beginning of the imperial evacuation of England. It was heard with far away reverberations, as it was repeated from other nearer points, and this vagueness, by a congruity of effect with the dull misery weighing on Leacraft’s heart, seemed to give to it a deeper poignancy of grievous import. It produced the impression of an irrevocable doom. As the sounds were heard by the assembled crowds, the speaker lifted his hand and raised his face skyward, as if in supplication, the heads were all uncovered by one spontaneous impulse, and, caught in the same wave of feeling, Leacraft sought the invocation of his own blessing on the King and all he stood for.

The interrupted speaker began his address. The man was a strong type. His face was somewhat leisurely framed in short whiskers, confined to his cheeks; his eyes were large, blue and unblinking, with a resolute look in them that had the merit of extorting, at least, a respectful recognition; his complexion met all the requirements of the English reputation for color, but it left no impression of254 having attained its superior brilliancy through less innocent means than exercise and personal care. His broad, high forehead—a little heightened in its expansive effect through the faltering recession of the iron grey hair that stood a little stiffly above it—rose above the admirably firm nose, whose size and contour formed to the reader of physiognomies another compelling admonition to give its wearer the rational allegiance of attention. The man’s voice was musical, with a single intonation that imparted to it much carrying power, and it yielded to certain tendencies of relaxation in speaking that gave it almost a feminine sweetness. Leacraft put him down for a labor leader of a sort, character and design belonging to the best elements of the current labor thought and organization; a man of that impressive stamp in modern adjustments of self-assertion, of which John Burns was so extraordinary an example.

He had begun his speech as Leacraft, with insistent zeal, pushed his way deeply toward the centre and margins nearer the stage, of the attentive throng.

“My friends, we must think for ourselves. We are not likely to have our thinking done for us to the best advantage. Now there are some plain, undeniable facts. They are the kind of facts which cannot be hid under a bushel basket, nor, for that matter, under a king’s crown. One of the most intelligible255 of these facts—and it is fundamental—is that the number of individual heads apportioned to the same number of paired legs make up the population, and units of population make nations, and nothing else can. An aggregate of gentlemen dressed in wigs, or holding truncheons sticking out of purple and gold-braided shawls never has, and, from sheer destitution, never could make a nation. By all the signs around us, and I am willing to accept them without any question, this country of ours is going to move; is about to begin housekeeping somewhere else, and I think it is an imperative necessity for the success of such a change that everyone living now on this island and calling himself an Englishman, must move also, and move to the same place (Hear, Hear,). But that moving is conditioned. It is indispensably necessary that we proclaim that condition, and insist upon its acceptance. We hold the situation in our own hands. We control the key to the future, to make or mar, or destroy the continuity of the English name. Why? Because if to-morrow the English workingman refused to follow the English flag to Australia, and took his wisdom, his tools and his savings somewhere else, that flag would lose twenty millions of subjects, and would wave over a remnant that could not ensure its protection or its support. (Hear, Hear). But the condition?”

The speaker paused, sweeping his eyes over the256 sea of upturned faces, as if he was hunting through the chaotic assemblage for the disclosure of some particular visage which, either as an ally or an opponent, might receive the shock of his omnipotent secret. Whether he discovered the facial invitation or not, was not revealed in his subsequent action. He wheeled sideways to the stiffened line of men behind him—doubtless expectant and impatient numbers in the afternoon’s programme—and bringing his clenched right hand into the hollowed palm of his left hand, shouted, and not discordantly: “The condition is the abolition forever of the Law of Entail that to-day makes us a servile race.”

Again he paused, as if so ponderous a statement, so fiercely declared, would elicit a demonstration—but to Leacraft’s abounding wonder, not a sound arose from the vast audience. Whether it was appalled, or thrilled, interested, or pleased, or dumbfounded, it gave no sign. Its immutable decree for the speaker to go on was its very silence. No public orator could conveniently, with respect to his own sensitive needs for public encouragement, stop there. But he had become cautious. He felt that perchance his auditors yet held mental reservations in favor of things as they were, as they wished them to continue.

“I say, with all my heart and soul,” he went on, “stay with the Flag, stay with the King, stay with257 our lords and ladies, but on one condition as freemen, to whose keeping now in this hour of peril they are wholly given. Into your hands the God of Nations entrusts their fate, but that fate can only be propitious as you are true to yourselves, your children, and your children’s children.”

Then came the long delayed approval. A wave of excited pleasure brushed across the crowds, and the hand-clapping, begun in many separate centres, ran together, and with shouts of acquiescence, with cheers, with central and periphera, agitation, the huge aggregate expressed its tumultuous adhesion. Leacraft felt that the loyalty of these people was not impaired, and that the logic of events would still hold them united in a consentaneous allegiance at least, to the idea of the English nation, though it was pretty evident that the democratic claims of a wider opportunity for personal, for family promotion, leavened all their feelings, and that in the new regime it might be expected, that a great deal of the present relation of the classes would be swept away, and that the old time idolatry of degree, the mere flunkeyism of homage to name and geneological prestige, among the masses, had shrunken into nothingness.

The stage was again occupied by a speaker, who was interested in very practical and urgent questions, the how and where and when, the disposition of the emigrants to the new country, and he revelled258 in plans, provisions, details of occupancy, and employment. He showed conclusively the power and effectiveness of organization, and the surprising accommodations that can be extracted from the most forlorn prospects by a shrewd use of forethought and combination. Funds had been scraped together, settlements, as yet in the dream stage of realization created, and a practical socialism consummated in the confederation of a large numbers in one common venture. This aspect of the emigration was dwelt upon by the speaker with some rigor. It was a surprise to Leacraft, and lent a strange expression to the still irreconcilable spectacle of Englishmen looking for a new home.

Leacraft soon tired of sums, schedules, names, and lists, and wandered away over the park through the scattered groups, many centred around one of those popular tribunes, who, by reason of a little more leisure, perhaps a little more application, and always much more labial facility, influence their class profoundly. The broad lawns were filled with these improvised parliaments, in which too banter, argument, retort, query, admonition bore a part. The perplexing thing was the average satisfaction shown by the people, a kind of holiday anticipation, as if they were off for an excursion. To them perhaps it seemed a new start in life, with the ground less encumbered by rivals, by restrictions, less shadowed by priority, and favors259 for a few, and by the intimidation of a necessary subserviency. They almost seemed happy in the thought of change. There was bitterness in this, and yet to Leacraft with his undissembling and emancipated mind it was understood. It meant chance to these people—this removal; and to most of them chance never came, never could come as they were. And then to linger, was starvation, loneliness, disuse, death. The business of the country had enormously shrunken, its productive power had been halved, commerce was drifting in stronger and steadier currents elsewhere, and no where so strongly as to Germany, while the over mastering pre-eminence of America loomed up in proportions that paralysed conjecture.

Pondering on all these things Leacraft, in his absorbed way, stumbled over a little girl on the edge of one of the shaded walks. He quickly stooped and picked her up, and confronted the young mother, already hastening to the rescue of her child.

“I should have been more careful,” said the embarrassed gentleman. “Well, indeed we have all good reason to be thinking more than seeing, these times,” said the smiling mother, “I wonder what we’ll all be like this time, come twelve month.”

“Oh, I dare say that we shall be doing much the same thing that we do here, in a different place—and then we shall be a year older;” the young woman260 laughed, and attested a complete willingness to talk more, as she raised the ruffled child from the grass and moved nearer to Leacraft. Nor was Leacraft indifferent. He felt nettled, and willful, with a subconsciousness of disappointment and fear. This human and healthy mother, with the fresh guerdon of her blushing youth in her arms, was a helpful companion, and then she carried the solace of some new story, perhaps a new need, and Leacraft was not averse to being sympathetic or helpful.

“Willie, that’s my man, sir,” continued the girl, “is right glad to get away. Last Candlemas his mother died, and left Willie her savings, and that, and what we have, will tide us to America, and Willie he says that he can get a home, and have a little land, and Willie will be better of his sickness. He’s not here the day, because of his cough and the fever that he has. Ah! sir, it makes me chill at my heart to see him, and to think that we are going so far,” and the sweet face looked piteously at Leacraft, and the tears overran the sad gray eyes. Leacraft saw it all; a consumptive father, poor, out of work, staking everything now to reach that bourne, where the hopeless of all nations saw the welcome light of opportunity. As he thought of this he saw how great this avulsion was, what a tearing up of the roots of family and home life, and how ruthlessly they were to be planted in all sorts261 of soils, under alien skies, with inauspicious hands to tend and raise them. He turned to the young mother, and said, “It won’t seem so far, if a face from the old home greets you there. I shall be there also, and I will not only be glad to see you, but glad to help you, if you need it. Take this,” and opening his card case, he wrote an address in New York city. “If,” he continued, “you do not remain in New York, this will always find me. Good bye.” He extended his hand and shook with unaffected warmth the hand of the young English woman, to whom the future loomed up in misty and insecure, perhaps menacing shadows. How merciful is sympathy, with what a solacing hand it soothes the “ruffled brow of care,” and how genially it bids the springs of life still follow, and, for a moment at least, flow too in the sunlight of affection. The English woman seized Leacraft’s hand and pressed it tightly, and her face looked into his with almost an enamored thankfulness; she raised the baby girl and held it close to Leacraft, and the restrained Englishman kissed it with quaint shyness. At the instant, all the shifting helplessness about him moved him inexpressibly. Again they shook hands and the Englishman betrayed into emotional excess, walked rapidly away, reassuring her at the last that he would indeed be soon in America.

A few feet away a different encounter swept him262 into a contrasted realm of emotional excitement. A rude brawling loafer, none too sober, and reckless in oaths and obscenity, had seized the small flags of two little boys—union jacks—and throwing them down on the ground, with an outburst of profanity trampled and defaced them. The Englishman inflamed and ardent, holding a wounded heart, stood stupified and insulted. The next instant and he had snatched the flags from their degradation, and with an instantaneous revulsion struck the culprit of this outrage squarely in the face. The blow was unmistakably adequate. The ruffian reeled and fell and failed to regain his feet, before a shout of applause greeted Leacraft and a concourse of men, who had hastened to the spot on the outcry of the children surrounded him with welcome salutation.

“A fine blow—well hit and straight as a gunshot man! That was the right medicine for his complaint. I’m thinking that a little water might wash it down. I say, boys, let’s duck him, souse him in the lake. A tubbing might clean his sassy mouth, and a man is none too good to be rolled in the mud himself, who treads on the English flag.” The subject of this criticism was on his feet again in rather a belligerent mood, blinking and rolling his fists in a minatory fashion, and sputtering defiance, and presenting a transient spectacle of inebriety and coarseness that would have been ludicrous, if the temper of the men behind the new263 speaker had not seemed so hostile. Leacraft felt that they would do some serious mischief to the miserable delinquent, and he stepped in front of them interposing his body between the foremost of the ranks, and the, now somewhat intimidated drunkard.

“I think my friends, that you should spare yourselves the trouble to punish this miscreant just now. Let him alone. Neither he or his kind are likely to hurt our flag. He has learned his lesson. To-day my friends it becomes us to command ourselves, and hold ourselves above resentment. We are all sad, our hearts are heavy, the old Manse is to be left and new conquests across the waters made, new homes. Ah! how large the vision grows.” The men had enclosed Leacraft in a dense circle. He saw that he had their attention, while the stumbling object of their first anger effected a shuffling retreat with ignominious haste. His ruse now was to entirely capture their thoughts. “It is a vision of a new England, one made so by our devotion, the fixed quality of our patriotism, an undeviating union among ourselves, and just pride in our history, our race, our King. It may be a better England; it can not be a more beautiful England. We are deeply stricken. While we bow to this necessity, let us make the grandest display of fortitude of resource, of hope, of courage, of skill, of judgment, ever known. In our disaster we shall again264 conquer the world and hold it submissive at our feet.”

Leacraft had enough disengagement of thought to half smile to himself at this grandiloquent pretense, but he knew his audience. It was quite British, embued with that cloutish conceit which all popular masses in every successful nation instinctively display. He had appealed to their conceit, though not only to that, and they responded enthusiastically. As he finished this mild buncombe, not without some misgivings as to his own honesty, as he intended at first to repair to the United States, the men nearest to him grasped his hand, others shouted approbation, and still others in silence moved away shaking their heads. Leacraft talked with the men about him. He found that they had been assigned places in the scheme of emigration; some were going to Australia, with a systematic dispersion over the region, which most needed their labor, others to New Zealand into socialistic farming; others to the cape and Rhodesia and still others to Canada; so that his exalted sentiment of solidarity lost a little of its impressiveness. Leacraft lingered a while longer, and as the day ended in a refulgent sunset with church bells, near and far ringing to the services, that now for a week would be held at all hours, inaugurating an unbroken intercession at the throne of grace for the guidance and protection of the people, he left his cordial265 acquaintances and went westward.

He reached Park Lane near the Kensington Gardens, Gloucester House, and the fountain of Thornycroft, the region of Mayfair, the dazzling centre, the illustrious apse of English social splendor, where the inherited privileges of life were not discordantly blended with the no less inherited gifts of fortune; that spot in all London which to relinquish, would seem to sound the depths of national disgrace. The moon swam in the lucent sky, the air was clear, but cold, and the familiar ravishing softness of the June nights as London knew them once, was gone; those illumined mists, the dewyness that spread from the ground to the enveloping air, and threw veil over veil of shimmering opacity upon arch and tower, sward, tree, bridge and storied palace, was all gone, too, and the beautiful neighborhood, as Leacraft wandered through it, from Cumberland Gate—where he saw snow still resting in sheltered recesses—along Park Lane to Hyde Park Corners, through Grosvenor Place to Chapel street, to Belgrave Square, was revealed in an aerial sincerity, that gave its splendor an almost scintillant loveliness, and drove still deeper into Leacraft’s heart the sense of a bewildering bereavement.

The streets were filled with flying equipages, and the mansions were ablaze, the sidewalks held few pedestrians, and as Leacraft sorrowfully moved266 through the stately purlieus, music swept out from open windows or swinging doors. Often he paused and watched the descending occupants of the carriages; they were entrancing women and peerless men, their laughter was silvery and undismayed, unchecked by tears. Could it be possible that these inner esoteric circles of London high life and unimaginable wealth indulged in revelry; could not the crash and fall of empires turn the votaries of gayety to soberer thoughts, or stifle the intoxicating voice of pleasure? Leacraft wondered, and the weariness of a great suspense weighed him down; the ingrained Puritanism of his nature raged against this heartlessness, this indecent bravado, a mockery of joy, where all should be shadowed with the sighs of penitence and supplication.

Leacraft was bitterly offended at this apparent heartlessness; it startled him beyond the limits of endurance; he looked for some representative of this foolish life, upon whom to turn with rebuke and denunciation. Leacraft wandered on in a disconsolate mood, and the growing indications, with the falling night, that the fashionable world of London was engaged, in a preconcerted way, to spend the last hours of its metropolitan sojourn in a spendthrift vortex of excitement and conviviality moved him to muttered objurgations. He had slipped past Hyde Park Corners, past the Apsley House, and had glided with hastening steps, as his267 passion of revolt, at this unseemly loss of self-respect, rose to a towering indignation, into Grosvenor Square. He stood facing the long facade, where in repetitive elegance, with columned porches and mansard roofs, and wall-like chimneys, the mansions of the very rich, illumined at all their windows, poured forth a torrent of light. Aggrieved and stupefied, he shot into Berkley Square, and still no interruption to the aspect of mad revelry. Could it be a frenzied spasm of indulgence, before separation forever from the bliss of the West End, that terrestrial paradise of swelldom and financial and social glory? He wondered. And thus wondering, he came to Devonshire House, fronting Piccadilly. The comfortable home, with its small brick work, peeking chimney pots, the low entablature and triple doors behind the iron gateway, and the unbroken watch of the woman-headed sphinxes, on either side of the elevated escutcheon of the Kingdom, was there, encompassed by its imprisoning walls—and here, too, the effrontery of lavish gayety assaulted his eyes. The gates were flung wide open, powdered footmen were ranged before the doors, arriving and departing carriages threaded Piccadilly with conscienceless celerity, music uttered its delicious melodies, and in them was no requiem note, no throb of sorrow, and the guests crowding into its dazzling halls seemed untouched by thoughts less careless268 than the joys of the fleeting moments, whose hurrying steps were bringing the dawn of disaster to England. Exasperated, Leacraft turned on his heel in disgust, and was going towards Leicester Square, when a sharp report somewhere on the side of the Geological Museum, and ahead of his position, startled him, and the next instant he saw a carriage, with prancing steeds, plunging down the street, the swaying figure of the driver denoting his complete loss of control, while on one side of the equipage, that side towards Leacraft, the pale face of a gentleman was seen, and beside him the distracted visage of an elderly lady. As the carriage approached Leacraft, it crossed the street, and the front wheels collided with the curbing. This administered a slight detention, and the struggling horses turned again to the opposite side of the thoroughfare. Quick to see his advantage, Leacraft sprang to the head of the nearer horse, and exerting all his strength, which was not inconsiderable, he succeeded in tripping the beast, and as it fell the traces holding its companion broke, and the freed creature raced away down the avenue. The driver leaped to the sidewalk and held the now imprisoned horse, which, starting to its feet, stood trembling beside him, while Leacraft hastened to the door of the vehicle to liberate its occupants.

He had already been forstalled by the gentleman269 himself, who pushed the door back as Leacraft reached it and stepped to the walk, followed instantly by the lady in much commotion and disorder. Their agitation was short lived, and succumbed to the exercise of their own self-control. It was the gentleman who first spoke: “I am under the deepest obligation to you, sir, for your quickness and your courage. You may readily have saved us from a miserable fate. And”—Leacraft interrupted: “You were going to some rendezvous of pleasure; this, sir, in my opinion, on the eve of the nation’s assassination deserved punishment.” The speech was crude, rude perhaps, and the bitter taunt smote the stranger like a physical blow. He recoiled from it as if the sting of a cowhide had crossed his face. His face itself was a study. He stared at Leacraft, and as the latter met his gaze unflinchingly the pale face, distinguished in outline, feature, and expression, flushed to the temples, while the eyes seated under bushy brows gazed at Leacraft with a peculiar earnestness, not relieved of the dangerous suggestion of a rising passion. His companion understood his excitement, she clutched his arm, and seemed to apprehend a physical outbreak. Then the mouth opened, and spoke, and the voice was unexpectedly calm, and the utterances measured: “We are under deep obligation to you sir, but it is difficult for me to restrain myself before the false statements you270 have ventured to make. Can you explain this insult?”

He moved nearer to Leacraft who did not budge, but inspired with an increasing vigor of disgust, and eager to summarily remonstrate at the seeming cruelty of the parade about him, its grotesque wickedness, said: “I do not wish to take advantage of the accidental relations which have thus unexpectedly thrown us together. But surely it is known among men, and known bitterly among Englishmen that the shadows of an awful twilight are falling about them, and the Nation’s Day is closing. At such a crisis can it be possible for men and women, calling themselves English, in whom the memory of English fame and English glory, is still a present pride, can it be possible that at this moment they still consort for amusement, for display, for the fugitive follies of mutual admiration? This aristocracy is the head and forefront of the nation, and it should now be bowed in penitence, in supplication, in the agony of self inquiry, and it stupifies me to find them gay, when the heart of England is breaking with grief.”

A curious metamorphosis worked in the lineaments of the gentleman he was addressing. The hard lines relaxed, and a wistful smile, that drew its occult meaning from the man’s interior sadness, stole softly over his face. He put out his hand, which Leacraft accepted, and he returned Leacraft’s271 pressure. There was an instant’s silence, and then the stranger spoke, still holding Leacraft’s hand, and retaining his undeviating inspection of Leacraft’s face, as if he would force upon himself the recognition of a friend.

“These are just words, sir,” he began: “but how much you misunderstand what is going on here. This apparent revelry is an effort to keep from swooning: it is the forced continuance of a life familiar to us, when that life is to be crushed into nothingness; it is the defiance of habit, the revolt against extinction, the mortal protest against the infamous tyranny of circumstances. It is a delirium of indulgence, to forget what is coming upon us; a moment’s arbitrary refusal to think of the future, a dance, in whose whirl we shall remit the impulses of suicide. It is unreasonable, but its monstrous unreasonableness to you sir, measures our appalling sense of the disaster we can not stop to think of, measures the intensity of the recoil from obliteration; like the dressed and garlanded victim of an Aztec immolation we taste again the festive sweets upon which perhaps our cloyed appetites are no longer to feed. We are the sufferers in this eviction; the greatest, the poor, the artisan, laborer, the vast mediocrity lose something, but it amounts to little more than the exchange of one station here, for another of the same sort somewhere else. In a material sense our loss is incalculable;272 half our riches disappears but with that loss goes social prestige, title, and the moral consciousness of elevation, the breath of our nostrils. I, sir, am ——.” Leacraft did not move; his astonishment was too sharply focussed upon all the astounding previous confession. “And,” continued the man, “the ruin of worldly fortune seems small, after all, compared with the sacrifice of that dignified and sheltered life, which moved serenely, with every accompaniment of joy, in these delightful abodes, and under the protecting aegis of an inexpressible separation from the rest of the world. But”—he seemed to wish to justify himself, somehow, as he noticed the still petrified stare of Leacraft—“we have not been neglectful of the matters of adjustment. Committees have been appointed, plans laid, funds appropriated, agents despatched, for the selection of our new homes, and though we take our flight with lopped wings, our plumage may in time resume its former beauty. Do not misunderstand us because of these assemblies. We too carry deeper than you the pain of an unutterable grief.”

He finished, and Leacraft drawn into a reverie over the singular confession, which was anything but reassuring, and partook, to his mind, of the dementia of the foolish victim of a depraved habit, was silent. He felt the imperious requirements of speech, but he could say nothing. He felt pity, he273 was not without sympathy, though perhaps in that matter, a certain savor of self denying control, and a practical judgment interfered with his approval of the hyperbole of the speaker. And, almost dreaming, he stood there while the stranger and his lady re-entered their carriage, to which the runaway horse had been reattached, and drove off. Leacraft watched them mechanically and then turned, walked down Piccadilly, crossed Green Park, and looked at Buckingham Palace. The huge structure was partially illuminated, and the square in front of it was filled with soldiers, many of whom were at rest around the Victoria Memorial. To an officer lounging near by, Leacraft said, “Can you tell me where the King is to-night?”

“He sleeps at St. Leonards in Shoreditch,” was the laconic reply.

It was two days later than the events narrated above, that Leacraft and Thomsen, with Miss Tobit between them, sat in a crowded window on Hammersmith road watching for the enormous procession that had been slowly winding through London, with offices and services, halts and functions, as the King sadly led the departure of the English people from the Mother of Nations.

And the vast pageant approached. Down Kensington road its first glittering sallies were seen, the block of London police, a gorgeous cavalcade behind them of the peers of the realm, and in the immeasurable distance the shimmering parts, that looked stationary, and yet were coming on with ample speed. The blaring trumpets in the bands drew near, the street was cleared from curb to curb, the dense assemblage, covering stoop and275 roof, and leaning from every window became silent, the reiterated thud of the falling feet was heard, and in an instant the marching host was passing beneath them. The police and the peers of the realm passed in silence or with barely noticeable tokens of recognition. The peers presented a dazzling array, on superbly caparisoned horses, and in the regalia of their separate stations, with a bearing of unmistakable dignity, and possessing in a large measure the impress and gift of English manly beauty, they uttered the note of caste. Behind them came the marshalled Church, a wonderful picture; choirs of boys, surpliced and gowned, in open carriages, priests and bishops, in their robes of office, with flying standards of chapel, church or cathedral, golden lambs, crosses and crowns, figures and mottes on white silk or ruby silk, in wavering confusion, while hymns in wavering sopranos rose petulantly, or again with sustained vitality and strength. It appealed to the people strangely. They became very still, and faces contorted with sobs, or heads bowed to hide the unbidden tears for a few moments drew a veil of gloom over the splendid show. After the Church and the peers, a forest of equipages brought in view the marvellous display of the robed and crowned peeresses, and succeeding this shining cloud of matrons, that gave the touch of tenderness, the atmosphere of feminine companionship, and276 endurance, as if the mothers of England responded in this untoward hour with an embracing sympathy; after them came the King’s Household and the King, with outriders, equerries, and panoplied footmen, a miracle of ostentatious and ceremonial color. His equipage was drawn by ten jet black stallions, with diapers of the King’s colors on their backs, and a line of ancient guardsmen, with pikes in their hands, hedging them in, and a footman in sparkling white at the head of each horse. The King was himself robed in the gowns of his high estate, and was uncovered, the Crown resting on a cushion in front of him. A cheer rent the air, unfurled flags and fluttering handkerchiefs, turned a sea of faces into an ocean of white and red pennants. The King gravely acknowledged the salute and bowed to right and left. He was alone; the Queen had been enthroned among the peeresses. After the King came the Mayor of London, with all the antiquated grandeur of his office, coach, beef eaters, and all, and the people settled back again to their luncheons, which had been interrupted by the King.

Then came the troops. The display was exhaustive. It was conceived upon a scale of imperial magnificence, and it appealed in the succession of its gorgeous units to the historic sense, to that divine purpose of continuity which every Englishman instinctively appropriates to his race and nation.277 It represented the chronological development of the English army. As its sonorous length defiled before Leacraft, he saw an objective symbol—nay, the corporeal fact—of England’s growing power; regiment after regiment made a pictorial calendar from 1660 to 1900, and to the informed mind what a vista of martial glory, what a presentation of advance and retreat over the tractless wastes of the world, they made! It was a trampling chronicle of woe and fame, shame and satisfaction; it embodied the progress of ideas, the clash of political tendencies, the spreading domination of English rule; it was a panorama of battles, the tide of victory, the ebbing terrors of defeat; it reflected the pages of political designs, political subterfuge, political confusion; the music that swelled from its ranks now sent the long waves of its solemn processional melody through the thrilled spectators, now in limpid folk-songs, quivered delightfully in their ears, and now again summoned them to their feet with the stately and pious invocation of the nation’s hymn.

The scarlet uniforms of the First Life Guards passed, and Maestricht, Boyne, the Peninsular, and Waterloo, flashed in view—the regiment which was raised in Holland by King Charles the Second, and was composed of eighty gentlemen, whose sobriquet of the “cheeses,” along with other Life Guards, had been acquired from the contemptuous refusal278 of their veterans to serve in them when remodelled, because they were no longer composed of gentlemen, but of cheesemongers.

Again, the Second Life Guards revived the stained memory of the Stuarts, its own exile in the Netherlands, its return with the restoration; and its sea green facings pleasantly restored for a moment the face of the injured Queen Caroline. Here were the Royal Horse Guards, that inherited, or at least might claim the virtues of the Parliamentary army, which fought with dogmas at the ends of their pike-staffs, and convictions in their hearts. Now passed the First Dragoon Guards, that carried on its proud records the Battle of the Boyne in 1690, Oudenarde in 1708, Malplaquet in 1709, Fontenoy in 1745, Waterloo in 1815, and Pekin in 1860, though to Leacraft’s sensitive mind the last was an inscription of disgrace. The beating hoofs of the “Queen’s Bays,” the Second Dragoon Guards, hurried the reminiscent admirer back to Lucknow and the Indian Mutiny. The nodding plumes of the Prince of Wales, with the Rising Sun, and the Red Dragon which came in view with the Third Dragoon Guards, unfailingly recalled to the custodians of English military renown, that the regiment captured the standard and kettle drums of the Bavarian Guards at the Battle of Ramilies. Trampling on the heels of their horses, the lordly “Blue Horse” defiled past, and the Fifth Dragoon279 Guards, which supported the vital legend, “Vestigia nulla retrorsum,” and which captured four standards at the Battle of Blenheim. Still the endless lines advanced, wavered, stood still, and again with rattling and shivering harness, passed. Now it was the Second Dragoons, the Scotch Greys, raised in Scotland, and older than any other dragoons in the British army, that started the furious applause, an ovation not unintelligently bestowed—for it was they who captured the colors of the French at Ramilies, and their standards at Dettingen. Now it was the “Black Dragoons,” the Sixth, on its glistening horses—once part of the Inniskilling forces, and still bearing as its crest the Castle of Inniskilling; now the Eighth Hussars, whose Protestant fealty had made their founders defenders of William of Orange at the Battle of the Boyne, and who, with signal power, captured forty-four stands of colors and seventy-two guns at the Battle of Leswarree. Now the Fifteenth Hussars, who bore upon their helmets the dazzling inscription, “Five Battalions of French defeated and taken by this Regiment, with their Colors, and nine pieces of cannon, at Emsdorf, 16th of July, 1760.” Swelling hearts greeted the Grenadier Guards, rich in the legacy of the fame of the defeated French Imperial Guards.

Here were the Dublin Fusileers—the “Green Linnets,” the “Die Hards”—the East Surries—the280 West Yorks—and Devons, who had been part of that indiscriminate blunder and glory—the Boer War.

And now the infantry, in closing ranks, unrolled the endless phalanxes. Where regiments, as entire units, were absent, companies took their places, and English cheers saluted the swinging standards. The Thirty-fifth, which took the Royal Roussillon French Grenadiers at the Battle of Quebec—the Thirty-fourth, which impregnably covered the retreat from Fontenoy—the Thirty-ninth, which defended Gibraltar in 1780, and captured the insurgents’ guns and standards at Maharajpore, in 1843, along with the Fortieth—the Forty-second, with the red heckle in its bonnets, to commemorate its capture of the French standards of the “Invincible Legion,” in 1801, as well as for its distinguished ardor in the Battle of Guildermalsen, in 1795, and the “Little Fighting Toms” stirred the crowds, and even to those who regarded the pageant with glances of bitterness, as the hollow mask of a cruel abdication, even to their glassy stare, this epic review brought a momentary gleam of gratitude and pride.

Here was the Forty-sixth, whose colonel, with the English nonchalence which always wins so enduring a regard with Englishmen, in spite of a kind of artifice of mere stubbornness in it, preached a sermon to his men, under a heavy fire, about the281 Lacedemonians and their discipline—and which, at least to an American, awoke only hateful memories—and here the Fiftieth, “The Blind Half Hundred,” who fought with damaged eyes in Egypt, and who shone resplendent with courage and gallant sacrifice at Vimiera—Ah! and here was the Fifty-seventh—“the Die Hards”—which had thirty bullets through the King’s colors, and only one officer out of twenty-four, and one hundred and sixty-eight men out of five hundred and eighty-four left standing at Albuera. The people shouted and stormed, an avalanche of flags suddenly sprang up over the walled street, and at points showers of flowers and bags of fruit descended in a tornado of delight. Surely, if Englishmen had such blood in them, the nation would yet live.

Here were the men from India, the regiments of the Seventy-third, the Seventy-fourth, wearing the badge of the “elephant,” the Seventy-sixth, too, that unfurled its victorious pennants at the Battle of Leswarree, and the Seventy-seventh and Seventy-eighth, and on, on, straight in the line, brave squadrons, whose illusive recognition in a numeral, connoted glorious deeds, defiant strength, the prodigal powers of the brave. The thundering salutations drowned the rollicking music of “Clear the Way,” the cry at Barrosso, which with fife and drum announced the approach of the Eighty-seventh—the Prince of Wales’ own Irish—and the282 Eighty-eighth, the Connaught Rangers, whose more loving sobriquet was “The Devil’s Own Connaught Boys,” from its gallantry in action, and its irregularities in quarters. Uniform and vanity with reciprocal enhancement made the Argyleshire Highlanders and the Gordon Highlanders and the Sutherland Highlanders an envious spectacle to manly youth, a vision of ingratiating heroes to feminine beauty. Again India sprang back to memory, perhaps not without, to souls of Leacraft’s fibre, inflicting some stinging stabs of remorse, when the One Hundred Foot, the One Hundred and Second Foot, “the Lambs,” the One Hundred and Third Foot, “the Old Toughs,” the One Hundred and Fourth Foot, and Seventh, and Eighth, and Ninth marched past, with ear shattering dim, in resplendent waves of color, and expressing the English temperament of reserved force, and intelligent determination, with, to the more analytical observer, a suggestion of brutal power in their sturdy and inelastic tramp.

And then came the people of the Earth, from the ends of the world they came; the wild, the exotic, the uncouth, the suave, and treacherous, the mystic, the benign, the terrible, in all garbs, in vestures of wool and silk and cotton, in no small numbers without much vesture. It was a web of hues, a carpet of figures and dyes, a lithe and sinuous and portentous living worm, each zone of its283 immense length, as it swayed and twisted and halted, and then slipped on with ludicrous indecision and disorder, made up of races, ethnic blotches or flowers from the round prolific globe. The army had been history, the procession now became psychological, a review of temperaments, endowments, climates, proclivities and talents; nay it wore the aspect of a zoological medley, a vast menagery of animal products, that with growl and scream, trumpetings or fluttering wings gave to the congeries of men and women who walked among them, or with them, the sentiment and resemblance of the parade of the beasts before Adam. As if with England’s dislodgement, the shaken countries of the earth emptied out their populations in her wake, disturbed in all their resting places by her calamity; spilled from their hidden corners into the shining light of day, and bringing with them the animals of the fields and the birds of the air. And the air itself was cruelly brilliant. The severity of outlines, the sharp shadows, the nipping frostiness in the shades, where the sun was not found, told the weary story that England had lost her climate, and was swept back in a normal alignment with the cold and feeble countries of the pole.

What is this odd group accentuated in the midst of all this confusion of types by a more bizarre strangeness, the quizzical fatuity and simpering284 idiocy of devotion—grinning shikaris from the Tibet with prayer wheels—from the lofty valleys of Baltistan and Ladakh, from Kargil and Maulbek Chamba—incredible children from the East with their rotating brass wheels, with a woman or so, proudly walking among them carrying a burden of wealth in her turquoise and carnelian encrusted pberak bound around her head and terminating in a black knotted fringe behind her neck.

And straggling on their tracks come the Malays from Pinang and Dindings, from Malaca and Singapore, the small brown men, enduring, brighteyed, straight black-haired, in jackets, trousers and sarongs—the tartan skirt fastened around the waist, and reaching to the knee—and with a raja sprinkled among them with a yellow umbrella over him, a dandy nonchalance printing his sleek cheek with dimples. And India, the nursery of religions, of dreams, of talking and sleeping and famishing men, followed, and for an instant Leacraft thought of Kim’s journey “from Umballa through Kalka and the Pinjore gardens near by up to Simla,” which Kipling told; he thought on “the flush of the morning laid along the distant snows; the branched cacti; tier upon tier the stony hillsides; the voices of a thousand water channels; the chatter of the monkeys, the solemn deodars, climbing one after another, with down-drooped branches; the vista of the plains rolled far out beneath them;285 the incessant twanging of the tonga horns and the wild rush of the led horses, the halt for prayers, the evening conference by the halting places, when camels and bullocks chewed solemnly together.”

He closed his eyes in a revery, and the next opened them upon the very thing. Here were the bullocks, the monkeys, the camels, and here too came the hulking elephants. Dravidians from the southern peninsular, in shawls; the Hill tribes, in coats; the high caste Hindus, in skirts and turbans; Mussulmen from Cashmere, and a few Indian Princes, with their suites, in a coruscation of gem stones, made up a train of spectacles that drew the eager crowds together, almost to the obliteration of the narrow string of exotics that, a little shabbily, shuffled along between them, with however the Princes on horseback or swung in state in palanquins.

But here came Egypt bearing her witness of the universality of that power which, with her, at least, had seemed to play the part of a benevolent trustee and guide. No longer the impetuous crowds crushed the line of march; behind the blaring band that now approached rode Lord Kitchener, Sirdar of the Egyptian army who had resumed his ancient post and from an overwrought sentiment for exoneration, announced his desire to remain there and thus efface the irreconcileable differences which had caused Lord Curzon’s retirement from India.286 It was a magnanimous action and had deeply ingratiated this popular hero in the favor of the nation. Lord Kitchener, with his staff, preceded, in military stateliness, and with smart precision, five regiments or groups of Egyptian soldiers. These were combined or selected so as to make a bouquet of colors, but essentially business like also in their serious regularity, a demeanor fortified to the point of affectation by the plaudits and unconcealed admiration of the hosts of people on the streets, and protruding from every point above them. There were Arab lancers—in light blue uniforms, almost too delicate in tone for daily travel, the bodies of the camel corps, with the blackest type of men in the Sudanese infantry regiments, assimilating to the soil of the desert in the color of their khaki costume, and then other details of the military organization, gleaming in immaculate white trousers and coats. It was unmistakably effective, and it imparted moral strength to this illimitable advertisement of physical power. It recalled the campaigns of Khartum and Omdurman, and memorialized that time-worn boast of the English rehabilitation of Egypt; a fact certainly, but not to be distinguished as a very incredible achievement.

The spectacle closed with Zulus and Hottentots, the bushmen of Australia, some dejected New Zealanders, and a picturesque assortment of Jamaican negroes, who tramped along with amusement in287 their staring eyes, and a raggedness of deportment, reflecting the wasteful and careless way of the tropics. Nor were there wanting Greeks from Cyprus. And at the last the loyalty of the Colonies was splendidly emphasized, Canada, Australia, South Africa, New Zealand, Natal, Bermuda, the Bahamas, contributed a final burst of patriotic zeal, and seemed to open the wide earth, to their kindred in the English island, for home-making and re-establishment. Nor was the show of devotion fortuitous or hollow. It was sincere. It represented a sudden rapprochement, an instantaneous and valid impulse of sympathy and support. Nothing had ever happened in the history of the English people, which had had so vital an influence in stimulating unity among the English themselves, which so peremptorily flung them into each other’s arms, and in a great peril summoned to the surface the inextinguishable claims of blood, ancestry, tradition, instincts, and pride, advancing them to a solidarity never before realised. Its effects were very apparent. The pictures of Hope, lit up by the imaginative flamings of Ambition, almost at times, at this dread moment, gave to the future in the new habitations awaiting them, an unexpected salubrity and beauty. The English leaders dreamed of new achievements, a new literature, a greatness vastly exceeding all historic records.

Three days after the parade, which Leacraft saw288 so magniloquently evolved in the streets of London, at Tilbury, the King left English soil, to transplant the symbols and the functions of the English government to Australia, and to begin the new experiment. The hills, the fields, the shores, were all too contracted to hold the army and the people, gathered in one sublime throb of loyalty and affection to witness the inexpressible event. The King wearing the uniform of a Field Marshall issued from a royal tent and with uncovered head moved towards the shore where his barge was moored. The moment was statuesque; the immeasurable multitude with a wave of heart breaking emotion uncovered; the national hymn played by a string and wind orchestra of four hundred pieces pierced the air with its magnificent undulation of melody, and a selected chorus led the engulfing tide of song. Amid the surges of vocal outpouring the parks of artillery belched their resounding salutes, the lines of war vessels with their crews at attention returned the iron throated call, and the King standing below the sweeping oars, turned for an instant towards the shore, and then regained his first posture of immovable fixture upon the pregnable sides of the Dreadnought, whither each stroke of those fateful oarsmen was swiftly sending him.

The suspense was insupportable, the poignant crushing terror of it all, the incredible predicament289 of a nation bodily leaving its birth place, stunned the crowds, and in silence with a thousand varying episodes throughout its interminable acres, the populace stood, dumb as the unresponsive rock, apparently as apathetic as the herding cows.

Then at sunfall the Dreadnought, followed by an escort of cruisers heavily churned the waters, and passed down the Thames, from its mouth into the Channel, and so on to the open sea, and with it went the concentrated expression of the Idea of the English empire—the King. How strangely immobile is Nature! A race which had covered its literary vestures with the garlands of poetry, wrought from the imagery in nature’s picture-book, which had spent its brain and industry in winning for nature new devotees, and new sacrifices of praises and idolatry, which had enthroned among its chiefest charms its surrender to the control of nature, in this hour of torturing doubt, disenthronement and eviction won no sign of recognition. The day closed brightly. The sun went down in a sky of unchecked splendor, and the moon-illuminated night bathed the ancient bastions of Tilbury with an argent sheen. The terrible event found no reflection in the august calmness and serenity of Nature. “Its withers were unwrung.” Enveloped in the processes of decay and change, the lapse of a kingdom was but a paltry contribution to the chronicle of destroyed continents, and shattered290 worlds. There was no contact between its mechanism and the obliteration of a sentiment, or an idea, or moral regime. Nothing short of a change in atmospheric pressure would bring tears to its face, or agony in its deportment. And what in any case was this desertion of a land, the removal of a people? It was subordinated to fluctuations of an oceanic river, to the up and down shiverings of the crust of the earth. It was a part of the huge drama part of the inlaid order of things, as determined at creation, when the ways and means of shaping the world, and all things in it, were inaugurated. Why should the disappearance of a condition shock a system of disappearances and appearances, which is another name for the unceasing orbit of revolutions in the face of the earth, and which is nature? An individual counts for nothing in the lapse of twenty-four hours gone or come. Why in the aeons gone and the aeons yet to come should the migration of a people, or the emptying of a vestige of the earth’s surface merit notice? And so the elements did not hasten to weep, or storm, or furiously proclaim their commiseration, and the whispering calls of the half revived summer from pond and wood and meadow retained their old time sweetness.

Thus it happened, but from the mouth of men and women, and prompted deeply in their yearning soul, rose clouds of prayers that night, for the291 safety of the King, and ever and anon as troops marched over the roads in the cold summer night the hymn:

was played with bewitching plaintiveness. Men and women stopped and sang it aloud as the regiments went by, and sometimes a company of troopers added with resounding vigor their sonorous refrain.

The Prime Minister and Mr. Birrell, and Mr. Asquith, who had been associated in 1906, in the famous dead lock between the Commons and the House of Lords over the Educational Bill, prepared on the departure of the King a statement which really was a programme of evacuation. It contemplated a progressive transference of the people from England, a slowly consummated shrinkage of the business facilities and the moderated outflow of capital to the new centres of English activity. In this way some check would ensue to the frightful fall in the land values and rentals, apart from the practical consideration of the physical impossibility of at once removing forty millions of people. The government had usurped unusual powers in the creation of a Committee of Direction, which by a house to house canvass, an292 exhaustive survey of all titles, and a comparative estimate of the hardship imposed by emigration to different families, with immense labor, had prepared an itemized list of departure of the families of London. This plan had been copied in the large cities of the kingdom, and a co-operative scheme framed, which comprised a detailed prescription of the time of sailing, and the places of settlement for all persons listed. These lists were commonly referred to as the “Doomsday Rolls.” The scope of the committee’s power was comprehensive. It prohibited to individuals and to societies, federations and unions, independent action, without explicit conference with the committee. It proved to be a most helpful device, and lessened to the lowest possible percentage of hardship the suffering of the people.

Leacraft and his new friends freed themselves from the jurisdiction of the committee, by announcing their intention to go to America, and upon ample evidence of their ability to do so, and their independent financial standing.

It was fully understood that the evacuation was to be a sustained, gradual movement, with, however, an irreversible determination to make it finally complete. It was not believed that England had become utterly uninhabitable, or that some vestiges of its former occupation might not be still maintained. A part of the plan of evacuation involved293 an affectionate care of its greater monuments of architecture, if possible, though the fierceness of the winter winds augured unhappily for the success of this design. A regency of love at any rate was to be established, and as many links as possible of connection, sentimental and real, were to be left unbroken.

And Edinburgh? Thomsen had woefully noted every day the scanty paragraphs which entered the papers, and which gave brief intimations of the devastating and continuous storms, which, through the winter, swept over Scotland. As if, in order that the impending changes might be most forcibly realized, and the loss of time averted from too leniently interpreting the enormous seasonal metamorphosis going on, nature had exhausted her power in developing disaster. Terrific gales had lashed the rocky coasts, fierce insatiable blizzards had devouringly raged in the interior, and the pitiless and untired skies had emptied avalanches of snow upon the southern counties of Scotland. Edinburgh became a storm centre. With whirling inconstancy the storms beat upon the doomed city from the East and West; buildings were almost buried in the banked up and superimposed drifts, crested ranges were in the streets, and palisades of snow tortured into fantastic shapes, towered over the outer eminences, fed from the blinding torrents of flakes driven off from the Pentland hills and the294 Salisbury Crags. These summits alone, in the whitened waste, lifted their scraped crowns to the thickened skies. Edinburgh had become a city of the Frost King, and his slumbering legions bivouacked on and around it, except when aroused to riotous commotions by the sudden descent of the whistling armies of the wind.

These details were rather incoherently reported, as the spring advanced, and an occasional survivor from the north made his way out of the beleaguered capital. When the spring had fairly ripened into summer, an energetic effort was made to reach Edinburgh, and it succeeded. Scotland at that time became inundated, and though the enormous accumulations of snow refused at once to surrender their blockade, they were so deeply broached and undermined that the North British line pushed a train forward to the edge of the city, though unable to reach its depot in the heart of the city, by reason of the hammered wedge of snow which it encountered under the Castle’s cliffs.

After cutting their way out, to the Lothian Road, the explorers began investigations and were horror stricken to find that immense conflagration had broken out, destroying great sections of the city, which owed its partial survival to the masses of invading snow. These fires had started in the houses occupied by the domestic bandits, who had seized the finest residences, provisioned them from295 the stores, and surrendered themselves to an orgy of rapine and indulgence, by which their own fears were stifled, through the excesses of their drunken dissipation. Hundreds of these unfortunates had perished in the flames, their recklessness had invoked. The picture of the noble and beautiful city was shocking. The fires had made inroads upon the attractive Princes street, and in the portions west of the Caledonian station, towards the Donaldson hospital, gaping openings and swept acres revealed the unchecked fury of the flames. While it was probable that the city might, with a return of auspicious conditions resume some of its old beauty it was also too plain that the veto of Nature had been indelibly written across all such plans. Glaciers had already begun their formation in the Highlands, and the incipient development of an Ice Age was forcibly proclaimed on every hand. The logic of events was unanswerable. The United Kingdom throughout all its parts must participate again in the benighted life of Labrador and Siberia.

And Europe throughout its borders felt the poignant exasperation of the Arctic goad. It trembled with a new apprehension. The touch of those icy fingers, stretched out in myriad lines of approach, swarming like wavering steel points in thick onslaught from the crowded skies, made it suddenly anxious. It corrected its habits, it took council of296 piety and played with beseeching care its pretty role of devotee. Its ridiculous and wicked society, with futile haste filled the churches, and tried to forget its inherited cruelty, and even turned with an unexpected solicitude to the consideration of improving, in some sure way, the state of the untitled majority. Its scientific men rushed into congresses and explored their text books, and read and reread hopeless papers on the why and how of it, but being unable to invent another Gulf Stream, retired into dismal prognostications of a returning Ice Age. In fact deluded, as scientific men often are, by language, they embraced the thought of a “returning Ice Cap,” which would successfully force its way from the Baltic to the Mediterranean. They nervously began measurements of the Alpine glaciers, took temperatures, wandered up in the higher regions of the atmosphere in balloons, sounded the floor of the ocean, established meteorological stations everywhere, and became so excited and convinced that they were happily on hand at a critical geological juncture, that they succeeded in supplying a technical ground for panic.

The statesmen and economists were more useful. They estimated the results of any continued lowering of the temperatures, the effects of climatic alterations on life and production, especially in grain, and found that the southern countries of Europe were in some danger, and the northern countries297 very really threatened with a commercial overthrow, as England had been. They too turned to the colonies of their respective countries for refuge. It looked as if the bursting receptacles of European Culture were about to explode and scatter over the ends of the world the germinal seeds of its civilization.

“Histories leave oppressive legacies behind them. They may furnish subjects for art and literature and poetry, but, as in family inheritance, they burden posterity with considerable rubbish. Society does not quickly free itself from superstition, nor from its habits of thinking or of doing things. Even when they become anachronisms we are loathe to part from them, because, to our own detriment, we are fond of them. America has started fresh, and runs on the road of opportunity, while other nations must hobble and limp as best they can, with the clogs of old usage and prejudice hanging on their feet.”

It was the voice of our friend Leacraft, and he was standing on a broad piazza built at the rear of a spacious villa on the topmost slopes of Staten Island, in the harbor of New York city, looking at the299 motionless ocean far beyond the fringe of land immediately before him, flushed by the setting sun. That luminary with glorious opulence had painted the sky a seething carmine in the west, and imparted its most delicate reminders of the morn to the eastern arches of the heavens, that hung above the sea. The picture was superbly satisfying. There was enough detail in the landscape, enough isolation of house and wood and field, of moor and strand, and not too much. The oncoming twilight softly blended these nearer things, yet left them palpable. But the day still flung its garlands of illumination over the broad skies; and the sensitive surfaces of the water with lavish sympathy repeated on its face the smiles of the blending zenith. And on either side of Leacraft stood Miss Tobit and Mr. Thomsen, and the month was June, and the year, narrated.

Before we satisfy our curiosity more closely as to their relation, or note those changes which five years, however kindly inclined, must leave behind them, let us follow this conversation which of itself 1915, five years after all the happenings previously may unroll some curtains of the past.

“Well,” it was Thomsen who was now speaking, “then I suppose you are not willing to quarrel with the material revolution we have been through, because all that has come between the present and the past, like the sundering of Damocles’ sword, has300 saved us from the necessity of denuding ourselves of the old things, turning us loose in a fresh field, where we may play high jinks with all we once venerated, and where we may end by despising ourselves, for the very liberties you seem anxious for us to indulge in.”

Leacraft motioned to the chairs, and the three sat down, in the same order as they stood. The place obviously was Leacraft’s, or he exercised some sort of control over it. And it was Miss Tobit’s voice which next took up the thread of talk—it was noticeable that Leacraft turned eagerly and looked at her, though his earnest face betrayed no symptoms of possession, in truth, a contemplative sadness for a moment rested on his features, vanishing even with its dawn.

“Why give up old things? Why change and change and change? You call it progress. Is it anything but going around in a circle? You will come back to the very things you now reject, and some centuries hence the world will try the old experiments of Feudlism and Chivalry; and Kings by Divine Right will be as popular as elected Presidents—indeed, people may care some day as much as ever to say their prayers and go to church.”

Both Leacraft and Thomsen laughed, but it was Leacraft who retorted, and he leaned far back in the Morris chair, his eyes bent upon the visionary ring of the horizon now webbed with bluescent301 shades.

“I think there will be no returns, Mrs. Thomsen”—Ah! then Leacraft had lost again—“no Merry-go-round; our path, the path of humanity, is on and on and on, not always straight, not always level, and never final in its destinations. It was a physical chasm that separated the first colonies of this land from Europe. They brought with them traditions, customs, though luckily not of a very silly sort—but the lack of continuity with the whole antecedent history of England practically destroyed that history for them, and they began in untrammelled freedom to think for themselves and determine the essence of manhood, of worth, of liberty, of faith, of brotherhood, and their thinking throve upon nothing so much as the contemplation of the as yet, humanly speaking, unused world about them.

“And the vicissitudes of living, the peril, the undiminished levy made by necessity upon their inventiveness, their industry, their courage, expelled the remaining vestiges of fealty to humbug, the pretense of class, the arrogance of office. They had wrested a living from Nature, under circumstances of unabashed familiarity with the cruelty of the savage, the obduracy of climate, and the grudging responses of a sterile soil, and they estimated worth by the hardihood of men who worked.

“An American essayist has pointed out the emphasis302 laid by the northern, the Teutonic races, upon individual liberty. He says something like this: The Germanic race has been distinguished at all ages for its political capacity, and the possession of vigorous institutions of self-government; that there grew up among the nations of this race a well ordered system of government, based upon the right of the individual. And why was this? Because they knew of the hardships of living, and the fibre of liberty-loving natures were formed under the kneading strains of perpetual conflict. James McKinnon has pointed out the same thing in his History of Modern Liberty.

“Arbitrary and selfish rule was most quickly crushed in Central Europe. No! we shall not return to the old follies, because we shall not be permitted to return; because struggle with Nature will never cease.”

“Russia has been a cold country,” answered Thomsen; “and if the gauge of liberty is coldness, we should expect to have seen the fruits of popular government ripening, if you will permit the paradox, in its zero atmospheres; or if wildness and natural enemies—those that make housekeeping difficult, and a man’s skin a precious abode for his soul—why have not the negroes of Africa won over the images of rhetoric which have been wasted upon Greece and Rome—both, by-the-by, hot countries?”

303

“Rome and Greece never knew what Liberty was in the modern sense. Both were types of class government. Before Christianity, there could be no ideal of freedom in its holiest meanings. As for Russia, the germs of liberty are yet buried there, but it is understood; an accident has put the autocracy in power, and like all beneficiaries of a system, its members fight for their living; besides, Russia has not left off its barbarism. But nothing under Heaven will keep her from being free. As to the negro, he lies too far back, too near to the origins, and, in any case, the dangers of the jungle are met by craft, rather than by consecutive exertion and daring.”

“You regret that our new growth in the Pacific—the Australian England—has not put on the features of a republic, instead of preserving the heritage of the kingly and royal class institutions under which the old England flourished. Do you think that nations can safely try experiments, like children playing games, or chemists mixing solutions, which, in the latter case, may at any moment blow their heads off? I think not.”

“I think,” Leacraft slowly replied, while Agnes Ethel Tobit—she who had become inferentially the wife of the handsome Thomsen—arose and, walking to her husband’s side, leaned over the back of his chair, thus looking down upon the speaker, who had turned towards Thomsen, as if her movement304 was dictated by a desire to hear his friend more distinctly; “I think that the finest, the most inspiring—yes, the most delicate and subtle virtues flourish in a republic, such as this Republic of the United States is. I confess, I am in love with it; I love its people. They are superbly human, and humanly noble. The American gentleman, and he lives on no particular and restricted level—you find him among the firemen, the policemen, the clerks, the fathers of families—this unique man is always gracious, delightful, unerringly just. I believe that these traits develop most naturally under the dispensations of equality, reasonably understood. I think the most fruitful national life ensues, when a nation stands fundamentally, in its government, and in its social conceptions, for common sense standards, and an unqualified acceptance of the principles of personal freedom. I like these Americans. To me, their ardor, their naturalness, their hearty friendship, their generous self-forgetfulness, and a certain deferential amusement at the foibles of less emancipated cultures, is fascinating. Of course, there are stupid rich Americans, dressed in most obnoxious livery of affectation and imitation, men and women who have treacherous tendencies in their feelings and desires, willing always to kick their own country, and willing to leave it, but never willing to relinquish the luxuries its prosperity has enabled them to enjoy.305 There are also hateful middle-class Americans, who deteriorate the impressions made by the best aspects of the American heart and mind; but the substance and the spirit of the American life, however much disguised, or, from momentary and economic reasons obscured, is to me the most palatable; it is palpably the best life now shown on the world; it is the most energizing, the most alert, and it carries the power of enormous assimilation, because it is built on the essence of manhood, the respect for the rights of others. I know what is in your thoughts and on the point of your tongue. You would ask: How about the Chinaman, the Negro, and the Japanese, perhaps? That is a long question, and has nothing to do with my contention, for in a nutshell, respect for others’ rights does not involve respect for others’ habits, and generous as the Americans are, they are not so stupid as to wish to imperil, for an unnecessary sentiment, the hard-gained benefits of their own national experiment. They have already leavened the whole earth; it’s not to be expected that they digest all of its rubbish as well. Let the rest of the world do something for itself, and clean its own social sloughs, by a little more admixture of freedom and sympathy.

“All this may seem to you intensely disagreeable, perhaps a little disloyal, but you wrong me. If I might answer your question without more evasion. I would peremptorily declare that I hoped that the306 new England in Australia would put on the lineaments, nay, incorporate the very breath and body of this land. I know it has not; possibly it could not; possibly pernicious and selfish instrumentalities have made it impossible. Pardon my intractable enthusiasm, but do not mistrust my heart. It is always England’s. The night is too calm, too beautiful, to disgrace it with wrangling. Let us tell the story of the last years to each other. Mine is a short one, and can come last; but yours? Ah! well I know some of it,” and Leacraft, without constraint or any show of vacillating envy, smiled up in the face of the pretty woman who looked down at him, and deeply that woman’s heart honored him for his magnanimous courage.

There was a pause for an instant, and then Thomsen began. He rose from his chair, and walking to the railing of the piazza, sat on it, half turned to the paling East, half towards Leacraft, and told the story of the transplanted English nation.

That story can be told in more exacting phraseology than the colloquial method permits, and until his narrative becomes more personal, let us authentically review the events he rehearsed, which form a unique historic episode.

With the departure of the King from the shores of England, the actual evacuation of the island began, and the means and ways of transferring the people previously thought out, were carefully applied.

307

The moment the King and Parliament arrived in Australia, a predicament arose. The King was recognized as king, functional in Australia and in England, functional anywhere the English control was established; but the Parliament of England, as the highest law-giving legislature of the realm, did it supersede the regional legislation of Australia? Was the autonomic power of the provinces of Australia obliterated with the arrival of the supreme legislative body of the British Empire? There was one broad, obvious proposition. The remedy to all doubt, collision, and ambiguity was to resume in Australia the exact conditions which had vanished in England, and now naturally sought a restatement and erection in the land the King and Parliament had reached. And this was generally accepted. There was a cordial and almost precipitate display of adhesion to the new plan. It destroyed the independent existence of the various sections of Australia, and made the continental island a unit under the control of the Parliament, just as England had been. The enthusiasm which greeted this solution was adequate and convincing. It gave renewed hope to the patriotic and loyal souls who prayed and worked for the re-production of the England they had left. The King himself responded to this burst of practical allegiance with a wise and fervent expression of affection308 and thankfulness. It was a gem of deliberate composition, and was well received. Meetings of endorsement and proclamations of ratification were made everywhere, and in the tumult of acclamation it escaped notice that a formidable opposition had become organized for a forcible resistance to the whole scheme. This was over-awed or suppressed, not without a show of force, in which Thomsen had been himself engaged, and which brought about some adventures around the region at Mount Harwick, in New South Wales.

Thomsen, after the conclusion had been reached that his own and Miss Tobit’s families should follow the stream of people going to Australia, rather, than was at first intended, to coincide with Leacraft’s wishes for them all to visit America, had sought employment in the Government’s service, among those to whom had been entrusted the regulation of this colossal emigration. He was therefore well acquainted with its various phases and results.

When the King and the Parliament left England, over two millions had preceded them, being naturally, those who accepted the situation, and who, besides, were not specifically limited for their support to investments at home. They went everywhere, many to the continent, many to India, perhaps half to America, which grew more and more, before the eyes of the people, as the most natural,309 most desirable, the most friendly home. A large number strayed to Africa, and yet others sought the expanding possibilities of South America. Englishmen had acquired such extended interests, drew so largely upon the resources of the entire world for their support, that now in a way they found natural business refuges all over its varied surface. It was a happy consequence of the constraining littleness of their own island.

The financial question was the real difficulty, apart from the harsh bereavement and hardship of the divorce from all their previous living and associations. It was solved, at least partially, by the Government issuing paper money, similar to the greenbacks, which carried the United States through the Civil War. These were furnished to applicants upon deposit of sworn, approved and examined statements of their property of all kinds in England. Twenty-five per cent of the amount thus appearing was given, or rather loaned, to the applicant, and with this he was enabled to make a start in the new quarters he had selected. The plan involved the assumption of an enormous burden by the Government, and an unqualified confidence in it by the people.

Of course, England was not in any sense to become a depopulated island. Its real estate values, though shrunk to slender fractions of their former worth, would yet have some value, and whereas,310 in the case of a manufacturer, the Government made the loan upon his attested resources in machinery and certified correspondence, the risk was reduced sensibly within discoverable limits. Loss, agitation, dislocations, in many cases ruin, resulted, but the transfer of the manufacturing plants was made most skilfully, and before the factories in England were closed, the same products were being produced in Australia. The menace of the emergency had startled Englishmen into a really reasonable and adequate show of sense, quickness and resource; usually poor business men, torpid and conservative, shackled with a kind of mild and traditional laziness, they became, under the stimulation of the danger of extinction, active and wary, and intensive.

In the meanwhile the climatic changes continued, and the face of the United Kingdom more and more altered under the infliction of the long and tempestuous winters, the cool, shortened summers, and the ice blockade about its coasts. For it had early become apparent that in some inexplicable way, the Arctic currents streamed down from the polar regions with reinforced volume and velocity, bringing with them the discharged masses of ice projected from their usual course westward, by the irruption into the Arctic Ocean through Behring Straits of the united oceanic rivers of the Gulf Stream and the currents from the Yellow Sea.311 Throughout the spring, the beleaguered coasts were deeply fringed with ice-floes and icebergs, whose chilling emanations created fogs, and wrapt the islands in cheerless cold. Each passing year had made more clear the surpassing wisdom of the evacuation. But a large population found that they could support themselves on the island, made up of the hardy, enduring types, the sailors, fishermen, and the boreal agriculturists—the farmer who entertains life successfully where the earth reluctantly yields her products, and the scant nature furnishes but few of the products of the soil. For now a most extraordinary thing happened. The refrigeration of Northern Europe had driven down towards the south the northern denizens. They eagerly seized the deserted land of the southerners, less accustomed to the niggardly responses of the field, and met the attacks of the climate with the accustomed patience and resistance to which they had become innured in their northern home. In this way the population of Iceland almost bodily left the bleak and ice-bound coasts of the Arctic island, that no longer offered the meagre semblance even of subsistence, which previously maintained its stubbornly hardy occupants. Nothing could have been more fortunate, as it retarded in some measure the shocking decline in the values of the land, and gave to all establishments that might otherwise have been turned into homes for owls312 and foxes a partial usefulness. Not indeed that the manufacturing interests would be considerably revived, but warehouses and buildings connected with manufacturing or shipping business would be made into storehouses, and the castles and large manor houses were converted into curious communal colonies, where those boreal people most joyfully repaired and developed profitable communities.

Large numbers of the very poor found in the exodus of the well paid or employed classes above them, a grand chance to renew their own luck. They became keepers of the deserted buildings; they fraternized with the newcomers, and freed from the incubus of a superimposed social repression, became happy and industrious.

To all the brands and grades of the surviving or deserted inhabitants came increasing numbers of Scandinavians; important fractions of the Scotch settled on the coasts of England, and even immigrants from Newfoundland and Canada were tempted to seize the strange opportunity to occupy vast and abandoned cities, which furnished them in many instances with palatial shelters, but which later became repellant and unpleasant abodes, from which they too willingly withdrew to the smaller settlements.

The tragedy of the big cities was complete. They were melancholy wastes, their empty streets seemed baleful and dismal. They gave ghostly thrills of313 terror, even in the noon-day, to the passers by—silent graves of past memories—the speechless, vacant, staring windows in the unlit rooms were like the open but expressionless eyes of corpses, and the awful fall of silence through the labyrinth of ways, roads, lanes, places, squares, alleys, descended upon the wanderer, caught by some malign trick of adventure within their voiceless, motionless depths, with the benumbing touch of the grave. He hastened his steps; he ran to escape the deadly stupor, the inexpressible gloom of loneliness, where every aspect betokened life. The solitude of nature inspires, draws to the lips an involuntary prayer, or places in the heart the movements of hope, but this hideous contradiction of signs and effect weighed like lead upon the spirit, and forced from the shrinking heart the ejaculations of despair.

Never on earth was there such a picture of dejected grandeur, as this emptied metropolis of the world presented; never before had a great city become its own tomb, through the flight of its inhabitants; never in any record of disaster, whether by earthquake, pestilence, flood or vulcanism, was there such obliteration as followed the withdrawal of the citizens of London from their own capital.

The thick blanket of the snow was thrown over it in winter, and its emergent domes, pinnacles, obelisks and needles offered a fantastic similitude314 to mortuary monuments, or else beneath the yellow moon its piercing whiteness, like a titanic face of someone killed, smote the blue black skies above it with remorse.

But in Australia the English strength revived and broadened; it promised to make a gigantic social revolution; it worked strangely enough in unison with the newly awakened hopes of the King to restore an accustomed prestige to the Crown. This political phenomenon attracted the attention of the civilized world. The King in a most adroit proclamation to the people had peculiarly enlisted their sympathy by his veiled complaint of the habitual loss of power, and the encroachments upon the kingly prerogatives of the self-constituted Cabinet of Ministers. The King’s action was always tacitly prescribed and anticipated. He was a puppet, dressed in regalia, with no shadow of power, real and personal. And this he resented, but his language was the sentences of diplomacy, and lost the individual note entirely in a concerned and measured argument, restrained by every possible regard for the present custom, urging a greater confidence in the King’s wishes, and a larger precinct of action for his judgment. This momentous promulgation was contemptuously referred to by its critics as “the Ourselves” letter, but it met a favorable reception and it enlisted the cordial endorsement of the House of Lords, nor was it altogether315 resented by the House of Commons. The achievement of this success led the King into a further step of interference, in the appointments and in the personnel of the Cabinet, and he succeeded further in impressing his wishes upon a number of important bills passing through the Parliament. In short, by a persistent pressure, seconded by friends among the people, and a growing following in the legislature, he had inserted his views, and extorted from the grudging concessions of the Commons’ recognition of the royal prerogatives. He had shown himself unusually active in resource, in suggestions, and in intercourse with the people. His examples had been followed with enthusiasm by the nobility, who, so to speak, spread themselves before the observation of the nation, and exerted an unaccustomed generosity and ubiquitous energy in practically assisting the work of rehabilitation. At a general election, many candidates were discussed and elected upon this issue, viz.: the restoration to the King of kingly power.

“And so, you see,” Thomsen concluded, “the unexpected happens, as it always does. We moved to an ultra-democratic milieu, a veritable nest of fads and socialistic temerities and experiments, and lo! the reaction sets in, and in Australia the King may recover the power, lost with the Stuarts, and the monarchial principle gets a shove ahead, which, with prosperity, and in England, no impulse316 short of the fiat of the Almighty, could have secured for it. A prophet who would have foretold that, would have scored a poor success in 1900 as a state maker.”

Before he had finished speaking, Leacraft had left his chair, and was walking to and fro near the speaker—and then he advanced to the edge of the few steps that led from the piazza to the open swards beneath them, which were fringed by an emergent crown of trees growing thickly in some lower crease or hollow of the ground, beyond which again the eye fell to the foot swells, and the undulations of land far off, in the flats, just beginning to twinkle with lights.

Leacraft spoke slowly, his eyes still fixed upon the distance, as if in revery, but his measured words came clearly to his two friends, carried by a voice which, always melodious and cultured, now gained a sort of passionate yearning, and then again was approved as disinterestedly clean and judicial: “All this is an episode. Nothing more. The future of the races of the world means the widening scope of the Republican idea. There can be no other. Education forbids its extinction. Yes, and Authority endorses it. This sudden foolishness in Australia will only invoke a perilous reaction. There can be to-day in governmental systems only varied applications of the one thought; the rule of the people through an appeal to the people’s choice of rulers.317 It is fundamentally common sense in an era of enlightenment, to begin with; but since the United States have eclipsed all nations, and raised the standards of individual action beyond all previous estimates, this conclusion has coercively been accepted, that through the influences propagated under this popular freedom of control, the finest, the richest, the sweetest, the most magnanimous types of character are also engendered and completed. A kind of psychological logic is involved. A vast psychic power of selection sets in, and irrevocably the most noble, the most disenthralled natures slowly appear. In comparison with their best results, the representatives of other cultures appear dwindling and abortive. And why? Because in the least limited field of opportunity the unrestrained power of nature to make character must of necessity evolve consummate and supreme examples. Nothing is more demonstrable. It must be conceded, I grant, that at first the crop of temperaments is marked more by rash hardihood, strident vulgarities, and climbing audacity, but these very qualities, which in the naming seem so distasteful, mature naturally, in later generations, into devoted courage, æsthetic spontaneity; juices of the fruit when green form the basis of its later richness.

“I know the tiresome and hackneyed nonsense, and the mean-spirited sneers of the European at the318 American, for his lack of culture, his defect in polish, his money-getting haste. And it’s all a lie!” Leacraft wheeled round as if on a pivot, and even in the pale light the Thomsens could see that his face flushed, and the stern decision of his voice betrayed the fires of resentment. “Who is it that these precious pretenders of Europe look to when they have famine and disaster; who has taught the lessons of sympathy, of open-hearted helpfulness, and unswerving generosity, or made them recognize in their own natures the almost exterminated seeds of kindness? As to culture, let me tell you in all seriousness that the idle glamour of a scholar’s diction does not weigh a barleycorn as against the flashing splendor of an honest and sincere spirit; as to polish, who made the European regard Woman as something better than the helpless ally of his lust, and the chained companion to his exultant vanity? Woman has gained a new empire of dignity in these new lands; she for once triumphs in the unquenched assertion of her rights. As to money-making greed, where under the canopy will you find a more meanly mercenary race than these same Europeans, inert panderers to pleasure for money, fortune hunters, and silent spectators of atrocities, if the risk of money loss stops their way to succor. I know the dolts and traitors on the American soil, the men and women who sell their birthright for the mess of pottage319 contained in a gilded name in Europe, or the hollow mockery of a coat-of-arms. These are the tattooed children of humbug—careless and ungrateful, indolent and self-seeking, lured by that strange beauty which Europe, for some inscrutable reason, seems to keep, and of which even I, an Englishman, feel jealous, for the sake of a country which may not be so good-looking, but which becomes every day more sublimely the appointed pattern of the future state. Well! my friends, you must pardon these ‘wild and whirling words.’ They may strike you as an unseemly tirade, but if you knew this land as well as I do, you, too, might trespass beyond the limits of moderation in its defense. But other matters have for you a less doubtful interest. The great physical revolution which has left its mark no less in the political world than in the material, has become consolidated and solidified into a permanent feature of the earth. The broad engulfment of the land at the isthmus has established an open way to the Pacific from the Atlantic, and the initial formation of the barrier northward from the Caribbean Sea by the erection of a ridge from Cuba to Yucatan, and partially from Jamaica to Honduras, this latter connexion the singular sequel to the disturbance which overwhelmed Kingston in 1907, has advanced far enough to effectually assist the momentous deflection of the Gulf Stream from the Atlantic. And another transformation320 has thereby been achieved. The alien mass of hot water pouring into the Pacific at the isthmus, when no longer propelled by the easterly winds, resumes its original impetus of rotary direction, and streams, sweeping northward, along the coasts of California, Oregon and Washington, bringing in its further extension warmth to British America and Alaska. By this amelioration of its climate, Alaska has specially profited. Its numerous mineral resources have been more exhaustively explored, and the wealth of its boundless areas promises returns beyond the wildest dreams of avarice.

“The convulsions which were so dismally foretold, in the social and political fabric of this country, never occurred. They were quite lost sight of in the wonderful happenings of the world, and the trite aphorism that the spirit of discontent is best overcome by an appeal to the spirit of curiosity, obtained an almost ludicrous illustration in the subsidence of every murmur of schism and contention, as the amazement grew over the upset of the temporalities of the world, as the earth readjusted its members for another, let us hope, long and uneventful slumber.

“For myself, perhaps I should deprecate your censure by an apology. It is true, I did not follow the fortunes of my country, though with my mind I ardently canvassed and considered them. The very interests which brought me to this land were321 English, and my superintendence and success with them, has in a few ways made the survival of not a few Englishmen possible at this crisis. Really, my best place of helpfulness was here. Jim has been with me, and has proved invaluable, and that poor woman, whom I told you about meeting in Victoria Park, the night before we saw the great procession of evacuation, was found by me, and now Jim is her husband. There’s nothing shocking about it. Her first husband died of consumption. It was a foregone conclusion. Jim showed himself a big-hearted friend, and the girl learned to think the world of him. And when she was alone, what could have been better from any point of view than that she should have married him?

“And for me, Mrs. Thomsen, there is peace, too.” Leacraft moved to the doorway of the broad hall that divided the spacious house. He pushed it open, and as the light from the interior fell upon his face, the visitors saw the smile of an abiding happiness upon the thoughtful countenance, and Agnes Ethel Thomsen utter a prayer of thankfulness that he had found contentment.