_Making Good His Possessions_ Wherever the army passed, it made good its possession wholly. It left no village behind it in its march whose means of existence, communication, food supply and machinery of labor and business it had not made entirely its own. Where there were destroyed places, the invader organized the population to rebuild them. He levied on every community, large and small, for funds. He paid out nothing of his own, except written scrip. At one blow the whole financial system of the conquered country was converted into one great source of tribute. Suddenly there came a storm of news to the Boston papers. It came from the country to the south of the harbor--from Cohasset and Hingham, Weymouth and Quincy.[102] Heavy artillery was being unloaded all along the line of the south shore branch of the Old Colony Railroad. Horses and limbers were moving along all the roads to the shore. Soldiers were advancing into all the towns. Before the Hingham wires were cut, the correspondent in that town reported that enormous guns were being moved through it, on heavy motors. Quincy telegraphed that troops had hurried through there and seized the 100-foot Great Hill, and also the yacht club house on Hough’s Neck. Then Quincy, too, was cut off. Scarcely half an hour later the fire from the forts broke out furiously. It was answered, with greater speed and fury, from the shore, where the foe had posted his great guns to enfilade the harbor defenses. At Fort Revere the commandant cut away concrete emplacements and succeeded in swinging one of his 12-inch guns around to fight the assailants, putting a heavy howitzer near Hingham out of action. A second plunging shot fell near a gun behind Baker Hill; but the assailants, from howitzer batteries concealed under Turkey and Scituate Hills, concentrated a desperate bombardment on him that drove the Americans from the works.[103] Firing from heavy caliber weapons at short range, pouring explosives and common shell and shrapnel from every vantage point along all the shore, the hostile army swept the rear of the harbor defenses with such blasts that the mere impact of the solid shells made a din like the pounding of monstrous rivetters’ hammers.[104] From the sea all the big guns of the ships struck into the chorus. The vessels pressed in as closely as they dared and opened with every cannon that could get the range. _Boston Completely Isolated_ Boston’s populace, listening to the clamour from the sea, scarcely noted that the bulletins were announcing that all the railroad lines of the Boston and Maine Railroad leading north and northwest to Portsmouth, Haverhill, Lawrence and Lowell had been seized, and that Boston was completely cut off. Silent policemen appeared all at once followed by men with posters and paste-pails. The crowds saw posters go up on their walls, signed by the Boston Citizens’ Committee.