In the Queen's, Humber, Victoria, and Prince's Docks the congested crowd of idle merchant ships were enveloped in flames that wrapped themselves about the rigging, and, crackling, leaped skyward. The Orphanage at Spring Bank, the Artillery Barracks, and Wilberforce House were all burning; in fact, in the course of the two hours during which the bombardment lasted hardly a building of note escaped. The houses of the wealthy residents far away up Spring Bank, Anlaby and Beverley Roads, and around Pearson's Park, had been shattered and demolished; the shops in Saville Street had without exception been destroyed, and both the Cannon Street and Pier Stations had been completely wrecked and unroofed. Soon after two o'clock in the morning, when the Russian war vessels ceased their thunder, the whole town was as one huge furnace, the intense heat and suffocating smoke from which caused the Russian Admiral to move his vessels towards the sea as quickly as the necessary soundings allowed. The glare lit the sky for many miles around. The immense area of great burning buildings presented a magnificent, appalling spectacle. It was a terrible national disaster--a frightful holocaust, in which thousands of lives, with property worth millions, had been wantonly destroyed by a ruthless enemy which Britain's defective and obsolete defences were too weak to keep at bay--a devastating catastrophe, swift, complete, awful. CHAPTER XVI. TERROR ON THE TYNE. England was thrilled, dismayed, petrified. The wholesale massacre at Eastbourne and the terrible details of the bombardment of Hull had spread increased horror everywhere throughout the land. Terror reigned on the Tyneside. Hospitals, asylums, and public institutions, crowded with affrighted inmates, had no food to distribute. In Newcastle, in Shields, in Jarrow, and in Gateshead the poor were idle and hungry, while the wealthy were feverishly apprehensive. A Sabbath quiet had fallen on the great silent highway of the Tyne. In those blazing days and breathless nights there was an unbroken stillness that portended dire disaster. In the enormous crowded districts on each side of the river the gaunt spectre Starvation stalked through the cheerless homes of once industrious toilers, and the inmates pined and died. So terrible was the distress already, that domestic pets were being killed and eaten, dogs and cats being no uncommon dish, the very offal thrown aside being greedily devoured by those slowly succumbing to a horrible death. Awful scenes of suffering and blank despair were being witnessed on every side. Three days after the enemy had ascended the Humber and dealt such a decisive blow at Hull, the port of South Shields was suddenly alarmed by information telegraphed from the Coastguard on Harton Down Hill, about a mile south of the town, to the effect that they had sighted a number of French and Russian ships.