He went on, picking his way, until he reached a plain which was surrounded by the dykes of the Po, the Mincio, and the Adige, and lying below the level of those rivers. The dykes of the last river had been pre-occupied and fortified by the foe; the stream of the river too was broad and rapid, and when Hawkwood had surmounted all other obstacles he was terribly puzzled as to how he was to overcome this. The puzzle was not made easier to him when, from the little eminence on which he and his little army were stationed, like rats upon a brick in a flooded sewer, he beheld the entire plain turning into a lake. The progress of the change worked like a dissolving view at the Polytechnic; and, when the ex-tailor felt the water percolating through the lower chinks of his leg-armour, he was thoroughly satisfied, or rather dissatisfied, that his opponent was playing him a sorry joke. “Nay,” cried he, on second thoughts, “it is not so; the men shall not catch so much as a cold!” The dykes had been cut, and he forthwith began himself to cut out a plan of triumph. He would neither be starved, nor beaten, nor moistened into submission. So he averred; and he had just declared as much when a messenger from the hostile leader, who occupied the only strip of land on which a man could walk dry-shod, sent by that road and messenger a present, which was delivered into Hawkwood’s own hands: it was a fox shut up in a cage! “Umph!” lowed the Essex calf, “it may be that I am a bit of a fox, and Reynard may know a trail that will take him safe home, and may spoil the sport of his pursuers by a ‘stole away.’” He at all events went boldly in the darkness of that same night to look for one. He and his men plunged into the water, and waded through it in a direction parallel to the dykes of the Adige. Through mud and water up to the horse-girths, and across trenches, which engulfed the heavier men, who could not clear them, they all waded on; and, when the second night had nearly been spent, and numbers had been lost by cold, fatigue, and hunger, the survivors—the almost despairing infantry—clinging on to the tails of the horses which floundered before them, at length emerged again on to dry ground, upon the Paduan frontier. The enemy did not dare to follow him in this hazardous undertaking, which had, as it deserved, so successful an issue. But even that enemy acknowledged that there was not a commander in Italy who, for bravery and for resources in moments of difficulty, could for a moment compare with Hawkwood the Tailor. If Florence enjoyed an unusually lengthened term of peace and prosperity, the happy result was chiefly owing to the gallantry of Hawkwood and his men. The value which the State set upon his services was exemplified when Florence disbanded all her foreign mercenaries, save John of the Needle and one thousand men, the Macedonian phalanx of the land.