The Fire of London broke out on the 1st of September, in a baker's shop in Pudding Lane. It rushed down Fish Street Hill, and soon enveloped the dwellings by London Bridge and on the banks of the Thames. Fanned by the winds, the conflagration swept westward and northward. It passed in leaps from house to house, and flowed in streams from street to street. Torrents of flame coming over Cornhill met others dashing up from Walbrook and Bucklersbury. Along Cheapside, Ludgate, the Strand, the furious element advanced, curling round the edge of Smithfield, before its frightful circuit was complete. Thatched roofs, timber walls, cellars of oil, warehouses filled with inflammable material fed the tremendous pyre. Lead, iron, glass, were melted; water in cisterns was boiled, adding vapour to smoke; stones were calcined, and the ground became so hot that people walking over it burnt their shoes. The libraries of St. Paul's, and Sion College, with large collections of books and papers, were consumed; half-burnt leaves fell by Baxter's house at Acton, and were blown even as far as Windsor.[506] Public buildings shone like palaces of fine gold or burnished brass, and glowed like coals in a furnace, heated seven times hotter than usual. Blazing fragments were swept, like flakes in a snow storm, over the City; whilst the dense conflagration underneath resembled a bow--"a bow which had God's arrow in it with a flaming point." The cloud of smoke was so great that travellers at noon-day rode six miles under its shadow. At night the moon shone from a crimson sky. Young Taswell, a Westminster boy, stood on Westminster Bridge, with his little pocket edition of _Terence_ in his hand, which he could see to read plainly by the light of the burning City.[507] [Sidenote: 1666.] [Sidenote: FIRE OF LONDON.] People were distracted. Everybody endeavoured to remove what he could--all sorts of things being conveyed away in carts and waggons, barges and wherries. Poor people near the bridges stayed in their houses so long that the fire touched them; and then they ran into boats, or clambered from one pair of stairs, by the waterside, to another. The pigeons were loath to leave their cots, and hovered about windows and balconies, until they scorched their wings, and fell. Churches were filled with furniture and articles of all kinds. Holes were dug in gardens to receive casks and bottles of wine, boxes of documents, and other treasures. The sick were carried in litters to places of safety, and multitudes encamped in the fields beyond Finsbury, in the village of Islington, and on the slopes of Highgate. Such was the eagerness to obtain the means of removing goods, that £4 a load for a carter, or 10s. a day for a porter, was counted poor pay. At the Temple, neither boat, barge, coach, nor cart, could be had for love or money; all the streets were crowded with appropriated vehicles of various kinds.