or this I thank thee, Lord! Let danger come as it will, thy servant is
now prepared!"

CHAPTER 15

"Then go we in, to know his embassy;
Which I could, with ready guess, declare,
Before the Frenchmen speak a word of it."
--King Henry V

A few succeeding days were passed amid the privations, the uproar,
and the dangers of the siege, which was vigorously pressed by a
power, against whose approaches Munro possessed no competent means of
resistance. It appeared as if Webb, with his army, which lay slumbering
on the banks of the Hudson, had utterly forgotten the strait to which
his countrymen were reduced. Montcalm had filled the woods of the
portage with his savages, every yell and whoop from whom rang through
the British encampment, chilling the hearts of men who were already but
too much disposed to magnify the danger.

Not so, however, with the besieged. Animated by the words, and
stimulated by the examples of their leaders, they had found their
courage, and maintained their ancient reputation, with a zeal that did
justice to the stern character of their commander. As if satisfied with
the toil of marching through the wilderness to encounter his enemy, the
French general, though of approved skill, had neglected to seize the
adjacent mountains; whence the besieged might have been exterminated
with impunity, and which, in the more modern warfare of the country,
would not have been neglected for a single hour. This sort of contempt
for eminences, or rather dread of the labor of ascending them, might
have been termed the besetting weakness of the warfare of the period. It
originated in the simplicity of the Indian contests, in which, from the
nature of the combats, and the density of the forests, fortresses were
rare, and artillery next to useless. The carelessness engendered by
these usages descended even to the war of the Revolution and lost the
States the important fortress of Ticonderoga opening a way for the army
of Burgoyne into what was then the bosom of the country. We look back at
this ignorance, or infatuation, whichever it may be called, with wonder,
knowing that the neglect of an eminence, whose difficulties, like those
of Mount Defiance, have been so greatly exaggerated, would, at the
present time, prove fatal to the reputation of the engineer who had
planned the works at their base, or to that of the general whose lot it
was to defend them.

The tourist, the valetudinarian, or th