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