glare that they knew not where to turn or what to do, and still cried out for help as loudly as before. Anon some famished wretch, whose theft had been a loaf of bread or a scrap of butcher’s meat, came skulking past barefooted, going slowly away because that gaol, his house, was burning; not because he had another, or had friends to meet, or old haunts to revisit, or any liberty to gain, but liberty to starve and die. And then a knot of highwaymen went trooping by, conducted by the friends they had amongst the crowd, who muffled their fetters as they went along with handkerchiefs and bands of hay, and wrapped them in coats and cloaks, and gave them drink from bottles, and held it to their lips because of their handcuffs, which there was no time to remove. All this, and Heaven knows how much, was done amidst a noise, a hurry and distraction like nothing that we know of even in our dreams; which seemed for ever on the rise, and never to decrease for the space of a single instant.” Through all this tumult and destruction the law was paralyzed. After much delay the sheriff sent a party of constables to the gaolers’ assistance. But they came too late, and easily fell into a trap. The rioters suffered them to pass on till they were entirely encircled, then attacked them with great fury, disarmed them, took their staves, and quickly converted them at the fire into blazing brands, which they threw about to extend the flames. “It is scarcely to be credited,” says a narrator, “with what celerity a gaol which to a common observer appeared to be built with nothing that would burn, was destroyed by the flames. So efficient were the means employed, that the work of destruction was very rapid. Stones two or three tons in weight, to which the doors of the cells were fastened, were raised by that resistless species of crow known to housebreakers by the name of the pig’s foot. Such was the violence of the fire, that the great iron bars and windows were eaten through and the adjacent stones vitrified.[195] Nor is it less astonishing that from a prison thus in flames a miserable crew of felons in irons and a company of confined debtors, to the number in the whole of more than three hundred, could all be liberated as it were by magic, amidst flames and firebrands, without the loss of a single life.... But it is not at all to be wondered that by a body of execrable villains thus let loose upon the public, the house of that worthy and active magistrate Sir John Fielding should be the first marked for vengeance.” In the same way, even before the destruction of Newgate, the house of Justice Hyde, whose activity the rioters resented, had also been stripped of its furniture, which was burnt in front of the door.