The commercial mind is sceptical in all ages. The Fleming and the Lombard--not by any means sure that they had acted wisely in the first instance in trusting themselves to the mercies of their plausible debtor--became doubly suspicious. They held a brief consultation apart, the result of which was a somewhat lugubrious proposal that they should proceed experimentally to Dover. Towards Dover they walked; Falstaff mechanically yielding to his conductors, as one whom despair had robbed of volition. Remarkable as the statement may read, it soon proved that Bardolph had spoken the truth. Smoking homesteads, trampled crops, with here and there a smouldering rick or coppice, too well corroborated his story. Scared and crouching figures, emerging from concealment, warned the travellers not to approach the town as they valued their lives. Numbers of the rebels, maddened with success, were still in possession of the neighbourhood, vowing destruction to every man with a delicate skin and a whole coat over it. What was to be done? Falstaff, magnanimously forgetting his own troubles in his anxiety for his guests, suggested that the latter should return to whence they came, leaving him to his fate. In another hour it might be too late. Their boat would be seized. Not if the commercial gentlemen knew it. If every rebel in ten thousand rebels had been in ten parts, and every part a rebel, they would have faced the entire insurgent camp rather than those terrible waves a second time in the same day. Besides, the thing was out of the question. The gallant crew--including the body servants of the two merchants--learning that plunder was the order of the day, had hastened in divers directions across country to enrol themselves under the national banner like the truest imaginable Britons. The unlucky foreigners begged of our hero not to desert them, promising that, if he would see them safely through the present difficulty, he should have no cause to complain of their--ahem!--leniency. John winked--aside; and repressed an inclination to execute, there, on the beach, what might have anticipated the invention of hornpipes by some centuries. He wrung the hands of his two friends, and vowed that, at all hazards, he would stand by them. Still he was at a loss to decide for the present emergency.---- The merchants suggested that they should proceed to the Falstaff Estate. It was possible that the incendiary spark had not yet reached so far. The fact was, these two gentlemen were rather anxious for a glimpse of the princely domain, of which they had heard such glowing accounts, under any circumstances. Even its blazing ruins would be a consolation, as proving that they had not been utterly taken in.