Thus urged, the soldiers who required little or no incentive to make use of their hands against their southern neighbours, laid on with might and main, and, clearing the house in a twinkling, drove the clamorous host out with his guests; after which they overhauled the premises, and set a few of his best runlets abroach. "A thousand thanks, my Lord Earl, for this timely rescue," exclaimed Finland. "But for your intervention I must indubitably have hurried some of those rogues into a better world." "And I had been worried like an otter by a pack of terriers," said Walter; "however, I have had blood for blood." "The old Moss Trooper's justice, Master Fenton," said Serjeant Wemyss, drinking a flagon of wine. "God bless the good cause, and all true Scottish hearts." "Here is to thee, Wemyss, my noble Halberdier," said the frank Earl, drinking from the same cup; "and I would to the Powers above, that this night King James had under his standard ten thousand hearts like thine. But time presses--away, lads, to the muster-place, for hark, our drums are beating." "The _générale_!" exclaimed Fenton and Finland, as the passing drums rang loudly in the adjacent streets. "Yes, gentlemen, the crisis has come," said the Earl; "an hour ago, De Schomberg arrived to deprive me of my command." "By whose orders?" "The Stadtholder's." "We know him not, save as an usurper," said Walter Fenton; "and rather than obey his Mareschal, we will die with our swords in our hands." Wemyss flourished his halbert, the soldiers uttered a shout, and poured forth to the muster-place. It was a clear frosty night; the whole sky was of the most beautiful and unclouded blue. Seven tolled from the bells of St. Peter's church. The winter moon, broad, vast, and saffron-coloured, rising above a steep eminence called the Bishops' Hill, poured its flaky lustre through the narrow and irregular streets of Ipswich, which in 1688 differed very much from those of the present day. There terror and confusion reigned on every hand for, on the drums beating to arms, the mayor and inhabitants feared that the Scots would burn and sack the town, which assuredly they would have done, had Dunbarton expressed a wish to that effect. Save where the bright moonlight shot through the crooked thoroughfares, the whole town was involved in gloom and obscurity; but every window was crowded with anxious faces, watching the Scots hurrying to their alarm-post, while the flashing of their helmets and the clank of their accoutrements impressed with no ordinary terror the timid and the disloyal.