car was fired at near Colchester.
Chelmsford is now occupied by German cavalry, cyclist and motor corps.
Have not heard of any loss of life, but whole country is panic-stricken.
Cannot send further news. Telegraph office closed to public, being
occupied in official business."

That was all. As my eyes rose from the blurred surface of the news-sheet
the picture of the crowd absorbed me, like a stage-spectacle. There were
from forty to sixty thousand people assembled, of all ages and classes.
Among them were perhaps one thousand, perhaps two thousand, copies of
the newspaper. Some ten thousand people were craning necks and straining
eyes to read those papers. The rest were making short, hoarse,
frequently meaningless ejaculations.

I saw one middle-aged man, who might have been a grocer, and a deacon in
his place of worship, fold up his paper after reading it and thrust it,
for future reference, in the tail-pocket of his sombre Sunday coat. But
his neighbours in the crowd would not have that. A number of
outstretched hands suddenly surrounded him. I saw his face pale. "Give
us a look!" was all the sense I grasped from a score of exclamations.
The grocer's paper was in fragments on the grass ten seconds later, and
its destroyers were reaching out in other directions.

"It's abominable," I heard the grocer muttering to himself; and his
hands shook as though he had the palsy.

But in other cases the papers passed whole from hand to hand, and their
holders read the news aloud. I think the entire crowd had grasped the
gist of it inside of four minutes; and their exclamatory comments were
extraordinary, grotesque.

"My God!" and "My Gawd!" reached my ears frequently. But they were less
representative than were short, sharp bursts of laughter, harsh and
staccato, like a dog's bark, and, it may be, half-hysterical. And,
piercing these snaps of laughter, one heard the curious, contradictory
yapping of such sentences as: "I sye; 'ow about them 'ot sossiges?"
"'Taint true, Bill, is it?" "Disgraceful business; perfectly
disgraceful!" "Wot price the Kaiser? Not arf!" "Anything to sell the
papers, you know!" "What? No. Jolly lot of rot!" "Johnny get yer gun,
get yer gun!" "Some one must be punished for this. Might have caused a
panic, you know." "True? Good Lord, no! What would our Navy be doing?"
"Well, upon my word, I don't know." "Nice business for the fish trade!"
"Well, if that's it, I shall take the children down to their Au