During the Wednesday, the King was most energetic. He journeyed round the fire twice, and kept workers at their posts, and assisted in providing food and shelter for the people. Orders were sent into the country for provisions and tents, and also for boards wherewith to build temporary dwellings. On Thursday the Great Fire was everywhere extinguished; but on Friday the ruins were still smouldering and smoking, and the ground so hot that a pedestrian could not stand still for long on one spot. From St. Paul's Churchyard, where the ground rises to about the greatest height in the old city, the eye would range over a terrible picture of widespread destruction, from the Temple to the Tower and from the Thames to Smithfield. Two hundred thousand homeless persons were camping out, or lying beside such household goods as they had been able to save, in the fields by Islington and Highgate. It has been computed that no fewer than 13,200 houses, 89 churches, including St. Paul's, 400 streets, and several public buildings, together with four stone bridges and three of the city gates, etc., were destroyed, while the fire swept over an area of 436 acres. Now, in connection with this great calamity, we cannot find any appliance at work corresponding to our modern fire-engine. The inhabitants of London seem to have been almost, if not quite, as badly provided against fire as Rome in the days of Nero. In fact, the chief protection in early days in England seems to have been a practice of the old proverb that prevention is better than cure, care being exercised to regulate the fires used for domestic purposes: we see an instance in the arrangement of the curfew-bell, or _couvre-feu_, a bell to extinguish all fires at eight at night. Still, when conflagrations did occur, we may suppose that buckets and hand-squirts, as soon as mankind came to construct them, were the appliances used. Entries for fire-extinguishing machines of some sort have been found in the accounts of many German towns: for instance, in the building accounts of Augsburg for 1518, "instruments of fire" or "water-syringes" are mentioned. Fires appear to have been very frequent in Germany in the latter part of the fifteenth and in the sixteenth century. And though we do not know much of the contrivances used in Europe in the Middle Ages, it is not until 1657 that we have any reliable record of a machine at all resembling Hero's siphon on the one hand, or the modern fire-engine on the other.