The city of London was a strange spectacle at this time. “The houses looked like skeletons,” says Defoe, “and an universal air of horror seemed to sit on the countenances of the people. All business seemed to be laid aside for the time, and people were generally intent upon getting help to repair their habitations.” The streets lay covered with tiles and slates, bricks and chimney-pots. Common tiles rose from 21s. per thousand to £6. Above 2,000 great stacks of chimneys were blown down in and about London, besides gable-ends and roofs by the score, and about twenty whole houses in the suburbs. In addition to those killed by the fall of various parts of buildings, above 200 were reported as wounded and maimed. And it must be remembered that these were not the days of morning and evening and special editions, and copious and generally correct reports. Had telegraphs and railways and steamships brought in the news collected by innumerable correspondents, as they would to-day, Defoe’s book would never have been compiled. And it may be here observed, in honour of the memory of that immortal author, that he never cites a case, or speaks of it as a positive fact, without giving his authority or authorities. He says in one place, “Some of our printed accounts give us larger and plainer accounts of the loss of lives than I will venture to affirm for truth: as of several houses near Moorfields levelled with the ground; fourteen people drowned in a wherry going to Gravesend and five in a wherry from Chelsea. Not that it is not very probable to be true, but, as I resolve not to hand anything to posterity but what comes very well attested, I omit such relations as I have not extraordinary assurance as to the fact.” This is hardly the way with all book-makers! Most of those killed were buried or crushed by the broken fragments and rubbish of falling stacks of chimneys or walls. The fall of brick walls made a serious item in the losses. At Greenwich Park several pieces of the wall were down for a hundred rods at a place; the palace of St. James’s was greatly damaged; the roof of the guard-house at Whitehall blown off, seriously hurting nine soldiers; the lead stripped off and rolled up like parchment from scores of churches and public buildings, including Westminster Abbey and Christ Church Hospital. “It was very remarkable,” Defoe notes, “that the bridge over the Thames [_i.e._, Old London Bridge] received so little damage, the buildings standing high and not sheltered by other erections, as they would be in the streets. Above a hundred elms, some of them said to have been planted by Wolsey, were blown down in St. James’s Park. Very fortunately the storm was succeeded by fine weather: for had rain or snow followed, the misery and damage to hundreds and hundreds of tenants would have been fearfully increased.”