the London correspondents, and others from the Central News, the Press Association, and the Exchange Telegraph Company. Most of the news, however, in that early stage of the alarm was culled from the exclusive information obtained by the enterprise of the sub-editor of the Weekly Dispatch.
Leeds, the first city in Yorkshire, was the centre of most intense excitement on that hot, stifling Sunday night. The startling report spread like wildfire, first from the office of the Yorkshire Post among the crowds that were idling away their Sunday evening gossiping in Boar Lane, Briggate, and the Hunslett Road, and quickly the whole city from Burton Head to Chapel Town, and from Burmantofts to Armley Park, was in a ferment.
The sun sank with a misty, angry afterglow precursory of rain, and by the time the big clock in the tower of the Royal Exchange showed half-past seven the scene in the main streets was already an animated one. The whole city was agog. The astounding news, carried everywhere by eager, breathless people, had reached to even the remotest suburbs, and thousands of alarmed mill-hands and workers came flocking into town to ascertain the actual truth.
As at Leeds, so all through Lancashire and Yorkshire, Volunteers were assembling in breathless eagerness for the order to mobilise. But there was the same cry of unpreparedness everywhere. The Volunteer battalions of the Manchester Regiment at Patricroft, at Hulme, at Ashton-under-Lyne, at Manchester, and at Oldham; those of the Liverpool Regiment at Prince's Park, at St. Anne's, at Shaw Street, at Everton Brow, at Everton Road, and at Southport; those of the Lancashire Fusiliers at Bury, Rochdale, and Salford; the Hallamshire Volunteers at Sheffield; the York and Lancasters at Doncaster; the King's Own Light Infantry at Wakefield; the battalions of the Yorkshires at Northallerton and Scarborough, that of the East Yorkshires at Beverley, and those of the West Yorkshires at York and Bradford.
