River and the dead hour of
night, and those slowly moving boats of hushed heroes creeping across
the waters to where the mighty Quebec hills gloomed hugely out. The
other is of that quiet church-yard in England, at Stoke Pogis, near
Slough, where pilgrims from many parts of the world still wander
through the pleasant Buckinghamshire fields to stand where Gray
conceived his Elegy.

Wolfe carried out his plan to perfection. Day was dawning as the
majority of his forces formed upon the Heights of Abraham. It was six
in the morning before Montcalm's irregulars were upon the field, and
nine o'clock before the French army was in position for action. At ten
o'clock the battle began. It did not last very long. Whether the
French were utterly disheartened or not by the appearance so
unexpectedly of the {290} English on the ground, which they had deemed
unassailable, certain is it that they made a poor fight of it. Though
the French forces amounted to nearly double the English strength, the
whole battle, from the first French advance to their utter rout and
flight, did not last a quarter of an hour. It was one of the sharpest
and the strangest battles in history. Both sides lost their generals.
Montcalm was killed; Wolfe, charging gallantly at the head of his men,
fell mortally wounded. The wild cry, "They run!" echoed in his dying
ears. He seemed to recover a kind of alertness at the sound, and
shaking himself from his deadly stupor, asked, "Who run?" We can
imagine the momentary trepidation in that gallant heart: could it be
his outnumbered followers? In a moment he was reassured; it was the
enemy who fled; with his last breath he gave some strategical orders,
and then fell back. "God be praised, I die in peace," he said, and so
passed away. The time may, perhaps, come when the great game of war
will no longer stir the pulses, and men will no longer feel that they
die in peace after the bloody defeat of their enemies. But so long as
the pulses of men's hearts do answer to any martial music, so long men
will say of Wolfe that he died well as became a soldier, a hero, and a
gentleman. He sleeps in Greenwich Church.

[Sidenote: 1759--An old French province]

The pride of England's colonial empire might find new stimulus in the
way in which the memory of one of the most brilliant scenes in the
story of England's career is kept green in Quebec. The traveller,
standing on Dufferin Terrace to-day, may in his mind'