after the epidemic had passed away that we were visited by another
calamity, infinitely less appalling, and yet at the time of its
occurrence far more startling. Sound asleep in the middle of a dark
October night, I began to dream, and, naturally enough at the time, my
dreams were of the war which had then begun. A Russian fleet escaping
from the Baltic had sailed up the Tyne and was bombarding Newcastle. So
ran my vision, and its effect was heightened by the firing of the guns I
heard in my sleep.

Suddenly my dream and everything else vanished from my mind, driven out
by a shock the like of which I had never experienced before. I was
sitting up in bed, trembling violently, and wondering what awful thing it
was that had broken in upon my slumbers. It was a sound--but such a
sound! Nothing approaching to it had ever fallen on my ears before; and
even when wide awake I still heard its echoes vibrating around me. My
brother James, strange to say, had slept peacefully through the roar of
an explosion the noise of which was heard at Sunderland, fourteen miles
away. In response to my cries he awoke, and at my urgent request went to
the window, which I was myself at the moment too much unnerved to
approach. Directly he drew aside the curtain the room was filled with a
glare that rendered every object as plainly visible as in broad daylight.
We believed that a large building used as a tannery immediately behind
our house must be on fire, but the building stood, and we saw that the
glare which lighted up the whole heavens was far away. It was shortly
after three o'clock on the morning of October 6th, 1854. Presently our
natural agitation was increased by a violent knocking on the front door
of the house at that untimely hour. It was the old man who "kept" my
father's chapel at Tuthill Stairs, and he brought with him a doleful
story. Evidently hysterical from the shock he had received, he told my
father, amid his sobs, that half of Newcastle and Gateshead had been