In the scarcity of boats, the Iroquois agreed to guide De Levi, with twenty-five hundred men, by land, through the rugged country which they called their own.

The Christian savages employed their short leisure at the confessional; the tribes from above, restlessly weary, dreamed dreams, consulted the great medicine men, and, hanging up the complete equipment of a warchief as an offering to their Manitou, embarked on the last day of July.

1757.

The next day, two hours after noon, Montcalm followed with the main body of the army, in two hundred and fifty boats. The Indians, whom he overtook, preceded him in their decorated canoes. Rain fell in torrents; yet they rowed nearly all the night, till they came in sight of the three triangular fires that, from a mountain ridge, pointed to the encampment of De Levi. There, in Ganousky, or, as some call it, North-west Bay, they held a council of war; and then, with the artillery, they moved slowly to a bay, of which the point could not be turned without exposure to the enemy. An hour before midnight, a couple of English boats were descried on the lake, when some of the upper Indians paddled two canoes to attack them, and with such celerity that one of the boats was seized and overpowered. Two prisoners being reserved, the rest were massacred. The Indians lost one warrior, a great chieftain of the nation of the Nipisings.

On the morning of the second day of August, the savages dashed openly upon the water, and, forming across the lake a chain of their bark canoes, they made the bay resound with their war-cry. The English were taken almost by surprise. Their tents still covered the plains. Montcalm disembarked without interruption, about a mile and a half below the fort, and advanced in three columns. The Indians hurried to burn the barracks of the English, tỏ chase their cattle and horses, to scalp their stragglers. During the day they occupied, with Canadians under La Corne, the road leading to the Hudson, and cut off the communication. At the north was the encampment of De Levi, with regulars and Canadians; while Montcalm, with

the main body of the army, occupied the skirt of the wood, on the west side of the lake. His force consisted of six thousand French and Canadians, and about seventeen hundred Indians. Fort William Henry was defended by the brave Lieutenant-colonel Monro, with less than five hundred men; while seventeen hundred men lay intrenched on the eminence to the south-east, now marked by the ruins of Fort George.

Meantime, the braves of the Nipisings, faithful to the rites of their fathers, celebrated the funeral of their departed warrior. The lifeless frame, dressed as became a war-chief, glittered with belts, and ear-rings, and brilliant vermilion; a ribbon, fiery red, supported a gorget on his breast; the tomahawk was in his girdle, the pipe at his lips, the lance in his hand, at his side the well-filled bowl; and thus he sat upright on the green turf. The speech for the dead was pronounced; the dances and chants followed; human voices mingled with the sound of drums and tinkling bells. Thus seated and arrayed, he was consigned to the grave.

1757.

On the fourth of August, the French summoned Monro to surrender; but he sent an answer of defiance. Montcalm hastened his works; the troops dragged the artillery over rocks and through the forests, and with alacrity brought fascines and gabions. Soon the first battery, of nine cannon and two mortars, was finished; and, amidst the loud screams of the savages, it began to play, with a thousand echoes from the mountains. In two days more, a second was established, and, by means of the zigzags, the Indians could stand within gun-shot of the fortress. Just then arrived letters from France, conferring on Montcalm the red ribbon, with rank as knight commander of the order of St. Louis. "We are glad," said the red men, "of the favor done you by the great Onontio; but we neither love you nor esteem you the more for it; we love the man, and not what hangs on his outside." Webb, at Fort Edward, had an army of four thousand, and might have summoned the militia from all the near villages to the rescue. IIe sent nothing but a letter, with an exaggerated account of

the French force, and advice to capitulate. Montcalm intercepted the letter, and immediately forwarded it to Monro. Yet not till the eve of the festival of St. Lawrence, when half his guns were burst and his ammunition was almost exhausted, did the dauntless veteran hang out a flag of truce.

1757.

To make the capitulation inviolably binding on the Indians, Montcalm summoned their war-chiefs to council. The English were to depart under an escort with the honors of war, on a pledge not to serve against the French for eighteen months; they were to abandon all but their private effects; every Canadian or French Indian captive was to be liberated. The Indians applauded; the capitulation was signed. Late on the ninth, the French entered the fort, and the English retired to their intrenched camp.

Montcalm had kept from the savages all intoxicating drinks; but they obtained them of the English, and all night long were wild with dances and songs and revelry. The Abenakis of Acadia inflamed other tribes, by recalling the sorrows they had suffered from English perfidy and power. At daybreak, they gathered round the intrenchments, and, as the terrified English soldiers filed off, began to plunder them, and incited one another to use the tomahawk. Twenty, perhaps even thirty, persons were massacred, while very many were made prisoners. Officers and soldiers, stripped of every thing, fled to the woods, to the fort, to the tents of the French. To arrest the disorder, De Levi plunged into the tumult, daring death a thousand times. French officers received wounds in rescuing the captives, and stood at their tents as sentries over those they had recovered. "Kill me," cried Montcalm, using prayers and menaces and promises; "but spare the English, who are under my protection;" and he urged the troops to defend themselves. The march to Fort Edward was a flight; not more than six hundred reached there in a body. From the French camp, Montcalm collected together more than four hundred, who were dismissed with a great escort; and he sent De Vaudreuil to ransom those whom the Indians had carried away.

1757.

After the surrender of Fort William Henry, the savages retired. Twelve hundred men were employed to demolish the fort, and nearly a thousand to lade the vast stores that had been given up. As Montcalm withdrew, he praised his happy fortune, that his victory was, on his own side, almost bloodless, his loss in killed and wounded being but fifty-three. The Canadian peasants returned to gather their harvests, and the lake resumed its solitude. Nothing told that civilized man had reposed upon its margin, but the charred rafters of ruins; and here and there, on the side-hill, a crucifix among the pines to mark a grave.

"For

Pusillanimity pervaded the English camp. Webb at Fort Edward, with six thousand men, was expecting to be attacked every minute. He sent off his own baggage, and wished to retreat to the highlands on the Hudson. God's sake," wrote the officer in command at Albany, to the governor of Massachusetts, "exert yourselves to save a province; New York itself may fall; save a country; prevent the downfall of the British government." Pownall ordered the inhabitants west of Connecticut River to destroy their wheel-carriages and drive in their cattle. Loudoun proposed to encamp on Long Island, for the defence of the continent. Every day it was rumored: "My Lord Loudoun goes soon to Albany;" and still each day found him at New York. "We have a great number of troops," said even royalists; "but the inhabitants on the frontier will not be one jot the safer for them."

The English had been driven from the basin of the Ohio; Montcalm had destroyed every vestige of their power within that of the St. Lawrence; and the claim of France to the valleys of the Mississippi and the St. Lawrence seemed established by possession. France had her posts on each side of the lakes, and at Detroit, at Mackinaw, at Kaskaskia, and at New Orleans. Of the North American continent, the French claimed, and seemed to possess, twenty parts in twenty-five, leaving four only to Spain, and but one to Britain. In Europe, Russia had been evoked to be the arbiter of Germany; Minorca was lost; for Hanover, Cumber

land had acceded to a shameful treaty of neutrality. Thus did the government of the English aristocracy paralyze the immense energies of the British empire.

And yet sentence had been passed upon feudal monarchy, whose day of judgment the enthusiast Swedenborg had foretold. The English aristocracy, being defeated, summoned to their aid not, indeed, the power of the people, but at least the favor of the people. The first English minister named by parliamentary influence was Shaftesbury; the first named by popular influence was the elder William Pitt. A private man, in middle life, with no fortune, with no party, with no strong family connections, having few votes under his sway in the house of commons, and perhaps not one in the house of lords; a feeble valetudinarian, shunning pleasure and society, haughty and retired, and half his time disabled by the agonies of hereditary gout, was now the hope of the English world. Assuming power, he roused the states of Protestantism to wage a war for mastery against the despotic monarchy and the institutions of the middle ages, and to secure to humanity its futurity of freedom. Protestantism is not humanity; its name implies a party struggling to throw off burdens of the past, and ceasing to be a renovating principle when its protest shall have succeeded. It was now for the last time, as a political element, summoned to appear upon the theatre of the nations, to control their alliances, and to perfect its triumph by leaving no occasion for its reappearance in arms. Its final victorious struggle was the forerunner of a new civilization; its last war was first in the series of the wars of revolution that founded for the world of mankind the power of the people.