The hands of a little band of energetic men, however, were busy throwing wide the floodgates, and no two men were more active than those veterans, one of the army, and the other of the law--General Hartwell and Sir Robert Herrick. To them it seemed that the signs of the times were full of deep significance, and pregnant with the highest hopes. They knew that there were still some men with grit in England, men who saw with bitter wrath the pass to which the nation had been brought. In their eyes the governance of this once glorious land had become a byword and a mockery. And it was because of this that the present humiliating spectacle was to be seen at Dover. Nor was that all. In the midst of these alarms, there was something else that shook and terrified the people, filling the minds of thousands with forebodings and distress. Strange symptoms of seismic disturbance had been reported not only from Bath, but also from other parts of England. Such awe-inspiring tremblings of the solid earth must ever produce a sense of apprehension which at any moment may grow into a universal panic. It was noticed that, so far, these disquieting indications were confined to the neighbourhood of thermal waters. At Matlock, Harrogate, Leamington, and Woodhall Spa, there had been a marked increase in the volume of the rising waters, with other signs of an abnormal earth activity. What did these things betoken? Signs of the times, they were variously interpreted. As in the days of Noah! The great multitude of men and women laughed at the shipbuilder and went about the business of their daily lives, so now hosts of dull and unimaginative persons remained unmoved in their obtuse philosophy. Others there were who believed a providential influence was at work--conveying an admonition and a warning by some such solemn signs as those predicted to occur before the last great change of all. Were there not to be signs in the heavens, and signs in the quaking earth, the sea and the waves roaring, nation rising against nation, creation, animate and inanimate, preparing for the awful Armageddon foreshadowed in the page of Holy Writ?