marched
to railway stations; and soon long trains, one after another in
endless succession, got into motion, all moving towards the south and
east, all converging upon London.

Last of all, after it had made a swift circuit of northern and
central and western England, the red light swept along the south
coast, and then swerved northward again till it flashed thrice over
London, and then it vanished into the darkness of the hour before the
dawn of Armageddon.

Since the ever-memorable night of Thursday the 29th of July 1588,
three hundred and sixteen years before, when "The beacon blazed upon
the roof of Edgcumbe's lofty Hall," and the answering fires sprang up
"From Eddystone to Berwick bounds, from Lynn to Milford Bay," to tell
that the Spanish Armada was in sight, there had been no such night in
England, nor had men ever dreamed that there should be.

But great as had been the deeds done by the heroes of the sixteenth
century with the pigmy means at their command, they were but the
merest child's play to the awful storm of devastation which, in a few
hours, was to burst over southern England. Then it was England
against Spain; now it was Anglo-Saxondom against the world; and the
conquering race of earth, armed with the most terrific powers of
destruction that human wit had ever devised, was rising in its wrath,
millions strong, to wipe out the stain of invasion from the sacred
soil of the motherland of the Anglo-Saxon nations.

CHAPTER XLIII.

THE OLD LION AT BAY.

The morning of the 6th of December dawned grey and cold over London
and the hosts that were waiting for its surrender. Scarcely any smoke
rose from the myriad chimneys of the vast city, for the coal was
almost all burnt, and what was left was selling at L12 a ton. Wood
was so scarce that people were tearing up the woodwork of their
houses to keep a little fire going.

So the steel-grey sky remained clear, for towards daybreak the clouds
had been condensed by a cold north-easter into a sharp fall of fine,
icy snow, and as the sun gained power it shone chilly over the
whitened landscape, the innumerable roofs of London, and the miles of
tents lining the hills to the north and south of the Thames valley.

The havoc wrought by the bombardment on the public buildings of the
great city had been terrible. Of the Houses of Parliament only a
shapeless heap of broken stones remained, the Law Courts were in
ruins, what had been the Albert Hall was