else that could float.  By such trifling means two active officers had secured the temporary control of the lake itself and of the approaches to it from the south.  There being no roads, the British, debarred from the water line, were unable to advance.  Sir Guy Carleton, Governor and Commander-in-Chief in Canada, strengthened the works at St. John’s, and built a schooner; but his force was inadequate to meet that of the Americans.

The seizure of the two posts, being an act of offensive war, was not at once pleasing to the American Congress, which still clung to the hope of reconciliation; but events were marching rapidly, and ere summer was over the invasion of Canada was ordered.  General Montgomery, appointed to that enterprise, embarked at Crown Point with two thousand men on September 4th, and soon afterwards appeared before St. John’s, which after prolonged operations capitulated on the 3d of November.  On the 13th Montgomery entered Montreal, and thence pressed down the St. Lawrence to Pointe aux Trembles, twenty miles above Quebec.  There he joined Arnold, who in the month of October had crossed the northern wilderness, between the head waters of the Kennebec River and St. Lawrence.  On the way he had endured immense privations, losing five hundred men of the twelve hundred with whom he started; and upon arriving opposite Quebec, on the 10th of November, three days had been unavoidably spent in collecting boats to pass the river.  Crossing on the night of the 13th, this adventurous soldier and his little command climbed the Heights of Abraham by the same path that had served Wolfe so well sixteen years before.  With characteristic audacity he summoned the place.  The demand of course was refused; but that Carleton did not fall at once upon the little band of seven hundred that bearded him shows by how feeble a tenure Great Britain then held Canada.  Immediately after the junction Montgomery advanced on Quebec, where he appeared on the 5th of December.  Winter having already begun, and neither his numbers nor his equipments being adequate to regular siege operations, he very properly decided to try the desperate chance of an assault upon the strongest fortress in America.  This was made on the night of December 31st, 1775.  Whatever possibility of success there may have been vanished with the death of Montgomery, who fell at the head of his men.

The American army retired three miles up the river, went into winter-quarters, and established a land blockade of Quebec, which was cut off from the sea by the ice.  “For five months,” wrote Carleton to the Secretary for War, on the 14th of May, 1776, “this town has been closely invested by the rebels.”  From this unpleasant position it was relieved on the 6th of May, when signals were exchanged between it and the Surprise, the advance ship of a squadron under Captain Charles Douglas,[2] which had sailed from England on the 11th of March.  Arriving off the mouth of the St. Lawrence, on the