days, till, in divers perils, the
camp at Montmorenci was abandoned, the troops were got aboard the ships,
and the general took up his quarters on the Sutherland; from which,
one notable day, I sallied forth with him to a point at the south shore
opposite the Anse du Foulon, where he saw the thin crack in the cliff
side. From that moment instant and final attack was his purpose.

The great night came, starlit and serene. The camp-fires of two armies
spotted the shores of the wide river, and the ships lay like wild fowl
in convoys above the town from where the arrow of fate should be sped.
Darkness upon the river, and fireflies upon the shore. At Beauport, an
untiring general, who for a hundred days had snatched sleep, booted and
spurred, and in the ebb of a losing game, longed for his adored Candiac,
grieved for a beloved daughter's death, sent cheerful messages to his
aged mother and to his wife, and by the deeper protests of his love
foreshadowed his own doom. At Cap Rouge, a dying commander, unperturbed
and valiant, reached out a finger to trace the last movements in a
desperate campaign of life that opened in Flanders at sixteen; of which
the end began when he took from his bosom the portrait of his affianced
wife, and said to his old schoolfellow, "Give this to her, Jervis, for
we shall meet no more."

Then, passing to the deck, silent and steady, no signs of pain upon his
face, so had the calm come to him, as to Nature and this beleaguered
city, before the whirlwind, he looked out upon the clustered groups
of boats filled with the flower of his army, settled in a menacing
tranquillity. There lay the Light Infantry, Bragg's, Kennedy's,
Lascelles's, Anstruther's Regiment, Fraser's Highlanders, and the
much-loved, much-blamed, and impetuous Louisburg Grenadiers. Steady,
indomitable, silent as cats, precise as mathematicians, he could trust
them, as they loved his awkward pain-twisted body and ugly red hair.
"Damme, Jack, didst thee ever take hell in tow before?" said a sailor
from the Terror of France to his fellow once, as the marines grappled
with a flotilla of French fire-ships, and dragged them, spitting
destruction, clear of the fleet, to the shore. "Nay, but I've been in
tow of Jimmy Wolfe's red head; that's hell-fire, lad!" was the reply.

From boat to boat the General's eye passed, then shifted to the
ships--the Squirrel, the Leostaff, the Seahorse, and the rest--and
lastly to where the army of Bougainville