“We were anxious to inform the friends of the children as soon as possible of the accident, in order to prevent that alarm which the exaggerated accounts in the first instance generally circulated on such an occasion would raise. This was undertaken by a friend; but, notwithstanding the precaution, the good people of Kidderminster, from which town we had several boys, were terribly alarmed. An uncle of a boy named H——, whose friends reside at Kidderminster, happened to be in Birmingham at the time of the fire. As soon as the news reached him, he wrote to his sister (the boy’s mother), to prevent any uneasiness which she might have felt had she heard a wrong account from another quarter. In his haste he incautiously made use of the following expression: ‘Hazelwood is burnt down, but Henry is safe.’ The report was immediately circulated in Kidderminster that the house was burnt down, and that all the boys except H—— were burnt. The friends of the other children were in a state of the greatest anxiety. The father of one of the boys immediately rode over in the greatest haste. He was soon followed by another. I need not say how glad they were to see their children. “During the course of the day the friends of many of the children arrived, and took their sons home. This, though it relieved us of the care of them, made us anxious whether an impression might not get abroad, that either we were particularly careless or very unlucky; the more so, as an alarm of the same kind, sufficient to induce us to send for the engines, although they had nothing to do when they arrived, took place the winter before. We now began to place the furniture in the school-room and the chamber over, as this part of the house had not been injured by the fire or the water. Some also took precautions to defend the house from further injury by rain. To accomplish this, we borrowed a great quantity of tarpaulin from the different carriers in the town, by means of which a temporary roof was constructed. I engaged a number of men to remove the rubbish which had fallen with the roof and ceilings upon the floors of the garrets, and to riddle it in order that nothing valuable might be lost. The quantity of rubbish collected amounted to several wagon-loads. Frederic, and I slept at night in the school-room to guard the house. We had also a watchman on the outside. The other part of the family slept at the neighbours’ houses.