LADY ATHLYNE
BYBRAM STOKER
PAUL R. REYNOLDS
NEW YORK
COPYRIGHT.
Copyright, 1908, by
BRAM STOKER
CONTENTS.
LADY ATHLYNE
CHAPTER I.
ON THE “CRYPTIC”
On the forenoon of a day in February, 1899, the White Star S. S.Cryptic forced her way from Pier No. 48 out into the Hudson Riverthrough a mass of floating ice, which made a moving carpet over thewhole river from Poughkeepsie to Sandy Hook. It was little wonder thatthe hearts of the outwardbound passengers were cheered with hope;outside on the wide ocean there must be somewhere clear skies and bluewater, and perchance here and there a slant of sunshine. Come whatmight, however, it must be better than what they were leaving behindthem in New York. For three whole weeks the great city had beenbeleaguered by cold; held besieged in the icy grip of a blizzardwhich, moving from northwest to south, had begun on the last day ofJanuary to devastate the central North American States. In one place,Breckenridge in Colorado, there fell in five days—and this on the topof an accumulation of six feet of snow—an additional forty-fiveinches. In the track swept by the cold wave, a thousand miles wide,record low temperatures were effected, ranging from 15° below zero inIndiana to 54° below at White River on the northern shore of LakeSuperior.
In New York city the temperature had sunk to 6.2° below zero, thelowest ever recorded, and an extraordinary temperature for a cityalmost entirely surrounded by tidal currents. The city itself was in ahelpless condition, paralyzed and impotent. The snow fell so fast thateven the great snow-ploughs driven by the electric current on