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.