The wind indicated by these two small straws suddenly developed, on the 25th of March, into a hurricane. Luckily it was not a hurricane which affected Mrs. Otway or her good old Anna at all directly, but it upset them both, in their several ways, very much indeed, for it took the extraordinary shape of a violent attack by a mob armed with pickaxes and crowbars on certain so-called Germans--for they were all naturalised--and their property. A very successful recruiting meeting had been held in the Market Place. At this meeting the local worthies had been present in force. Thus, on the platform which had been erected in front of the Council House, the Lord Lieutenant of the County, supported by many religious dignitaries, headed by the Dean, had made an excellent speech, followed by other short, stirring addresses, each a trumpet call to the patriotism of Witanbury. Not one of these speeches incited to violence in any form, but reference had naturally been made to some of the terrible things that the Germans had done in Belgium, and one speaker had made it very plain that should a German invasion take place on the British coast, the civilian population must expect that the fate of Belgium would be theirs. The meeting had come to a peaceful end, and then, an hour later, as soon as the great personages had all gone and night had begun to fall, rioting had suddenly broken out, the rioters being led by two women, both Irish-women, whose husbands were believed to have been cruelly ill-treated when on their way to a prison camp in Germany. The story had been published in the local paper, on the testimony of a medical orderly who had come back to England after many strange adventures. True, an allusion had been made to the matter in one of the recruiting speeches, but the speaker had not made very much of it; and though what he had said had drawn groans from his large audience, and though the words he had used undoubtedly made it more easy for the magistrate, when he came to deal with the case of these two women, to dismiss them with only a caution, yet no one could reasonably suppose that it was this which led to the riot. For a few minutes things had looked very ugly. A good deal of damage was done, for instance, to the boot factory, which was still being managed (and very well managed too) by a naturalised German and his son. Then the rioters had turned their attention to the Witanbury Stores. "The Kaiser," as Alfred Head was still called by his less kindly neighbours, had always been disliked in the poorer quarters of the town, and that long before the War. Now was the time for paying off old scores. So the plate-glass windows were shivered with a will, as well as with pickaxes; and all the goods, mostly consisting of bacon, butter, and cheese, which had dressed those windows, had been taken out, thrown among the rioters, and borne off in triumph. It was fortunate that no damage had been done there to life or limb.