As the shells fell on New England’s coast, so the news fell on the United States. It sped as a vast confusion of facts and rumors, bewildered tales of terror, inventions born of crazed brains, dispatches that told only half a story, and messages that told none at all and yet, in their very incoherence, told more than intelligible words could have done. The newspapers were tested that night, and the steady, intangible discipline of the great organization held true. Never a linotype in all the cities had to wait for its copy. The word went to the presses to “let her go.” Extras followed extras. But the news sped ahead of the extras. It sped, and spread, and grew, and became monstrous. The enemy had forced the harbor defenses of Boston! So ran the rushing rumor in New York and Philadelphia. Long before trains could carry papers there, people in far-off country districts heard it. The State House was in ruins! Portsmouth and Boston Navy Yards had fallen! New York, ran the stories through Boston and all New England, was invested at both approaches! Fort Totten had been blown up! The enemy ships had the range of the city, and already the sky-scrapers were toppling into Broadway! The government was fleeing from Washington! An army had landed on the Delaware coast! Even those who had the newspapers before them, and knew that none of these things was true, were shaken when the tales that had sped ahead, came back like the back-wash of a wild sea. Many hundreds that night ran with the newspapers in their hands and helped to spread, and make more fantastic, the fantastic falsehoods that had been born miles away. But the newspaper organization worked steadily. Bit by bit the medley took tangible form. From the watchful, self-controlled chain of light-house and life-saving stations, revenue marine and other coast guard services; from the steady, unimaginative army and navy; from the alert, unshaken harbor-defenses, bit by bit the story of the night began to come in orderly sequence. _The Sea Vitals of the Commercial United States_ The enemy fleet was biting into the sea-vitals of the commercial United States, the southern coast of New England between Cape Cod and Long Island Sound whose possession is the key to the manufacturing and industrial life of the East. Battle-ships lying off the mouth of Buzzards Bay were dropping shells into the harbor and into the shores. One ship had ventured close into the land, approaching within the zone of fire from Fort Rodman, and had dropped shells near New Bedford. Hidden by intervening hills, it had escaped return fire, and was now lying just out of range, dropping an occasional 15-inch projectile toward the defenses.[26] Other ships were firing into Narragansett Bay. They, too, were firing at immensely long range, to avoid return fire from the defenses. Montauk Point’s wireless transmitted a dispatch that three vessels were standing in there and lowering boats. Then the apparatus fell silent.