d suffered, but boasting that they had surprised fifty-three English,
and killed or taken all but one. It was a modest and perhaps an
involuntary exaggeration. "The very recital of the cruelties they
committed on the battle-field is horrible," writes Bougainville. "The
ferocity and insolence of these black-souled barbarians makes one
shudder. It is an abominable kind of war. The air one breathes is
contagious of insensibility and hardness."[454] This was but one of the
many such parties sent out from Ticonderoga this year.

[Footnote 454: Bougainville, _Journal_.]

Early in September a band of New England rangers came to Winslow's camp,
with three prisoners taken within the lines of Ticonderoga. Their
captain was Robert Rogers, of New Hampshire,--a strong, well-knit
figure, in dress and appearance more woodsman than soldier, with a
clear, bold eye, and features that would have been good but for the
ungainly proportions of the nose.[455] He had passed his boyhood in the
rough surroundings of a frontier village. Growing to manhood, he engaged
in some occupation which, he says, led him to frequent journeyings in
the wilderness between the French and English settlements, and gave him
a good knowledge of both.[456] It taught him also to speak a little
French. He does not disclose the nature of this mysterious employment;
but there can be little doubt that it was a smuggling trade with Canada.
His character leaves much to be desired. He had been charged with
forgery, or complicity in it, seems to have had no scruple in matters of
business, and after the war was accused of treasonable dealings with the
French and Spaniards in the west.[457] He was ambitious and violent, yet
able in more ways than one, by no means uneducated, and so skilled in
woodcraft, so energetic and resolute, that his services were invaluable.
In recounting his own adventures, his style is direct, simple, without
boasting, and to all appearance without exaggeration. During the past
summer he had raised a band of men, chiefly New Hampshire borderers, and
made a series of daring excursions which gave him a prominent place in
this hardy by-play of war. In the spring of the present year he raised
another company, and was commissioned as its captain, with his brother
Richard as his first lieutenant, and the intrepid John Stark as his
second. In July still another company was formed, and Richard Rogers was
promoted to command it. Before the following spring ther