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.”