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THE EVACUATION OF ENGLAND

The Twist in the Gulf Stream

by

L. P. GRATACAP

Author of
“The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars,”
“A Woman of the Ice Age”






New York
Brentano’S
1908

Copyright, 1908, by Brentano’s




CONTENTS


  CHAPTER                                     PAGE
     I. IN WASHINGTON, APRIL, 1909               5

    II. THE LECTURE                             38

   III. BALTIMORE, MAY 29, 1909                 66

    IV. GETTYSBURG, MAY 30, 1909               102

     V. THE EVICTION OF SCOTLAND               131

    VI. THE TERROR OF IT                       170

   VII. IN LONDON, FEBRUARY, 1910              195

  VIII. THE EVACUATION                         231

    IX. THE SPECTACLE                          274

     X. ADDENDUM                               298




THE EVACUATION OF ENGLAND




CHAPTER I.

IN WASHINGTON, APRIL, 1909.


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 parlor 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 and 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, 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 will 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 offer 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 for 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 emotion
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, 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 wishes 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 be 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
barely 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 order 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 interpellation 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 had 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 information 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 to 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 her 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 it 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, for 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 earthquakes 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,
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 political 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.”

“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
progress 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
the 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 almost 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 himself 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 extinct 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--, 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, the 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, underwent 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, 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.




CHAPTER II.

THE LECTURE.


      Note.--If the reader is too much interested in getting to
      the upshot of this tale, let him skip the Lecture. But it
      is a mistake. This Lecture was delivered by Mr. Binn on the
      Ninth of April, 1909, and is well worth while.

“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 inequilibrated
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. 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
shock 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 last 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_, having 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 of 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.

“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 with 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 terminus 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 the 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 outliers 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, sensibly
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 summits 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
relation 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.”

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 is 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 that 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 terrifying 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 of 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, one 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
western 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
the 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 excitedly 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_.”

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 credit 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, I 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 he 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.




CHAPTER III.

BALTIMORE, MAY 29, 1909.


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, 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, not
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 requirements 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 gray 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
for 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 wondered 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 a 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 with 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 various 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 promised 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 of 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, 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 the 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, solicitous 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 in 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 the 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
for 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.

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.”

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 compunctions 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, 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.”

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. In 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 back 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 had 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 spread 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, accompanied 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, 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, 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 and
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, 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 Windward
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 over 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 in 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 the 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.




CHAPTER IV.

GETTYSBURG, MAY 30TH, 1909.


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 life 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 other 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. The 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 averse 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
rudely 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 was 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 unusual 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, the 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.

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 its 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, 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, 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 and 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 celebrate 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, and 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
furnished 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 no
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, frequently 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, 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 scientific 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 before 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, 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, 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 the
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 mechanical 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 sun 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
waters 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.

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.




CHAPTER V.

THE EVICTION OF SCOTLAND.


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 spotless 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 habitual 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 England 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 had 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 of 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 in 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. had
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 they 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 could 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 the 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 plunged 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 vertical 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 incredible 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, 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, 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, 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 with 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 somehow 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, and 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 at 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 the 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 attitude 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, “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 length 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 of 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
range 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, 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
success 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, where 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 prepared 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! there 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 Leacraft 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 extemporaneous 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 acquiescence was astounding. It became a matter of faith that the
population should vacate their own city, and they obeyed instructions
unanimously with a touching self-surrender to fate. Great numbers
left Leith by boats and steamers summoned from London. The railroads
responded with promptitude, though, by reason of a sudden access of
energy in the government, nothing less would have been tolerated,
longer than was necessary to confiscate their property and franchises.
The phenomenal desertion of the city by three hundred thousand souls
seemed as fore-ordained, as obligatory in the regime of events, as the
setting of the sun, or the return of the seasons.

But no activity of all the available means of transportation would
have sufficed to take a population of more than three hundred thousand
men and women in less than two months away from the city, unless it
had been supplemented by other means. And a strange and most effective
movement accomplished completely what more recondite or artificial
methods would have failed to secure. The “Frigidists,” the group of
fanatical preachers and their followers, who found in the present
calamity an opportunity for a religious propaganda, or, through the
fermentation and clouded expectations of their own zeal, believed it to
be the expression of a supernatural agency, had begun a street crusade
(always in Edinburgh popular and familiar) to accomplish the removal
of the people. These singular fanatics served a most benevolent end,
and their strange hallucinations wisely aided the anxious efforts of
the authorities. They arrayed themselves in white, and went bareheaded
through the streets of the city, exhorting all who would listen to
accept their interpretations of the approaching judgment. They wove
their texts of prophecy with denunciations of sin, and with the
crowding evidences of some astounding climatic change, repeated with
accelerated eagerness in paper, pulpit and forum, they acquired a
tyrannous control over the emotions of the populace.

Then they quickly, and with excellent discernment, organized the
people into small regiments, distributed to them white cockades and
white rosettes and marched them out of the city, southward, over
the frozen and snow-lined roads. This evacuation began scarcely
soon enough for the best results. But it gave relief. These moving
companies, accompanied with vans and horse carts, and vehicles of every
description, gathering numbers along their way, grew in picturesque
confusion, as flocks of sheep and herds of cattle were united to them,
or the miners from the coal pits, and the artisans from the factories
joined in the vast, singing army.

Like the inexorable morality of the French mobs in the French
Revolution, who scornfully resisted the temptations of their
own hunger in a fierce zeal to protect private property, so an
overmastering enthusiasm permeated those rough Scottish nomads, and
they marched through the country rigorously just and honest. There
was suffering and death among them, and nothing could have been
more sublimely pathetic than the improvised services of burial that
were held from time to time along the roads they crossed. Those who
heard its vibrant and powerful melody will remember the eclipsing
magnificence of the hymn, sung to the air of _Adestes Fideles_, which
began with the words:

  “Firm, faithful and tried,
  With endless glory crowned.”

The success of these “Frigidists” was phenomenal, but it also clearly
arose from the awful portents of change which made the stoutest men
quail, and not inaptly tested the scepticism of the boldest scoffers.
The revolution in Nature had not only affected Scotland; its dire
effects were felt in the whole of the Scandinavian area, and the
more southern parts of Europe, which had owed some measure of their
favorable winters to the direct or intermediate influence of the Gulf
Stream, were now made to feel their sudden penury in its removal.

A frightful stagnation invaded the European markets; a panic of doubt
spread confusion everywhere, and those who controlled the sources of
money, very soon checked its use in the avenues of trade, while of
necessity speculation and the desire for speculation simultaneously
vanished.

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. 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.”




CHAPTER VI.

THE TERROR OF IT.


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
the 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 Scotland 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 clearness 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. It 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
us 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. 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 seriousness 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 questions 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, and one very much worse,
however bad the old one was. I am too dazed with all this. I feel as
if I must wake up and find it all a horrible nightmare. But there can
be no excuse for self-deception with me. I have studied this question.
I am one of the most convinced that Scotland is doomed. Yes,” and the
speaker straightened himself with a movement of exhaustion, “that
England is doomed, too, that we are about to see primal conditions
returning which are normal physiographic states, but which will destroy
our civilization. Listen,” and as Leacraft sank into a chair near
him, he leaned again upon the table and spoke with a sort of eager
impatience at his own logic, as if he invited and expected and hoped
for contradiction. “Listen. The isothermals as they existed before
this calamity were a travesty on the map; they were an outrage upon
meteorological symmetry. See here,” and Sir John drew out a portfolio
which he opened on the table before him; he opened it and displayed a
Mercator projection of the world.

He was about to continue when a shout, which had mingled with it
a throb of grief, like a loud wail, entered their ears--Leacraft
noticed at the moment that the train was moving; it had been moving
for some time. He looked out of the compartment window. “We are
leaving Edinburgh,” his voice sank to a sympathetic whisper, as Sir
C-- suddenly turned to gaze, too, along with all the rest, upon the
shrouded city.

The snow was falling from a leaden sky, and the mantled city, with its
higher buildings, here a spire, there a monument, like an irregular
mound hiding a burial, was indistinctly, very partially, seen. The men
and one woman--the Scotch girl saved that afternoon from the tomb of
snow--were standing in the coaches, leaning out of the open windows, to
fathom the dull, mottling obscurity of the air, to catch--to be forever
remembered--some recognized feature of the great, beautiful habitation
now left in the on-coming night time, to be buried in the whirling
wreaths. Hidden between its hills, imperishable but unseen, and waiting
for its resurrection again into the joy of life and usefulness--a
dead city, save for those brigands who, like wolves or ghouls, dared
death to fatten on abandoned riches, amid its solemn, terrifying
loneliness! Strange vicissitude! and as Leacraft descried, in a blurred
exaggeration of its natural size, the dome of St. George’s Church,
opposite the Albert Memorial, a voice somewhere among the tearful and
dumb gazers repeated this verse from Burns’ invocation to the honored
and historic site:

  With awe-struck thought and pitying tears,
    I view that noble, stately dome
  Where Scotia’s kings of other years,
    Fam’d heroes, had their royal home.
  Alas! how changed the times to come!
    Their royal name low in the dust!
  Their hapless race wild-wandering roam,
    Tho’ rigid law cries out,’twas just!

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, 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 sentimentalities 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, resumed 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, 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 contingencies 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, 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 into 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. 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, and 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. 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 the 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 us 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, 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.”




CHAPTER VII.

IN LONDON, FEBRUARY, 1910.


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 auditors 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.

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, 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 its 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, 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, especially 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
frightened 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 patriotic 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,
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,
escaping 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, 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, 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. “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 before
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 not 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, spun
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, 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 assortment
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.

“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 ink 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 deprived 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
same 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, the 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, 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 was 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 up 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, English 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 whole
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 at
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
prepared 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 accent 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. 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, in 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 unusual 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 action 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.




CHAPTER VIII.

THE EVACUATION.


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 the 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 centuries 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 exhilaration 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 Almighty 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 were 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 the 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 arriving 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 End 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--

  God save King Edward!
  Long live King Edward!
  May the King live forever!

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 really 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 together 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 admiration 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, 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 everywhere 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 malcontents 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. 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 mellowness 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.”

“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 to 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. And 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! 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 along 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 a 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 of
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 intelligible 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 the 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 with 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 revelled 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 favors 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 woman 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
sorts 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 him 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 new 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 again 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 cordial 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
moved 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 his 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 careless
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 gentleman 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 you 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’s 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; 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, he 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.




CHAPTER IX.

THE SPECTACLE.


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 and 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,
and 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. 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
refusal 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 Dragoon 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--the 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 the 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 the 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 its 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
simpering 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; 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. 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 in 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 saw 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 predicament 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 shattered 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
the safety of the King, and ever and anon as troops marched over the
roads in the cold summer night the hymn:

    Lord of the Wave and Deep,
        Save those at Sea,
  Their path upon the Ocean keep,
        And let them see
    Thy hand each passing day,
      Thy Ministry of Peace.

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, an
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 involved 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 the 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 from 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 of
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 countries 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.




CHAPTER X.

ADDENDUM.


“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 the
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, has 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 bluescent 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 emphasis 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?”

“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 movement 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. 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 the 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.

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 affection 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, 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, 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. 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 owls 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 of 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
similitude 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
altogether 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 impulse 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. 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 the 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 pottage
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 transformation 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 were 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.




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Transcriber’s note:

Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a
predominant preference was found in the original book.

Many, but by no means all, simple typographical errors were corrected.
Unpaired quotation marks were remedied when the change was obvious,
and otherwise left unpaired.

Page 5: Transcriber removed redundant book title.

Page 257: “with central and periphera, agitation,” was printed that way.

Page 282: “ear shattering dim” was printed that way.