oon died."]

[Footnote 461: _Rogers, Journals, 20. Shirley to Fox, 26 July, 1756._
"This afternoon Capt. Rogers came down with 4 scalps and 8 prisoners
which he took on Lake Champlain, between 20 and 30 miles beyond Crown
Point." _Surgeon Williams to his Wife, 16 July_, 1756.]

Some weeks after, Rogers returned to the place where he had left the
boats, embarked in them, reconnoitred the lake nearly to St. John, hid
them again eight miles north of Crown Point, took three prisoners near
that post, and carried them to Fort William Henry. In the next month the
French found several English boats in a small cove north of Crown Point.
Bougainville propounds five different hypotheses to account for their
being there; and exploring parties were sent out in the vain attempt to
find some water passage by which they could have reached the spot
without passing under the guns of two French forts.[462]

[Footnote 462: Bougainville, _Journal_.]

The French, on their side, still kept their war-parties in motion, and
Vaudreuil faithfully chronicled in his despatches every English scalp
they brought in. He believed in Indians, and sent them to Ticonderoga in
numbers that were sometimes embarrassing. Even Pottawattamies from Lake
Michigan were prowling about Winslow's camp and silently killing his
sentinels with arrows, while their "medicine men" remained at
Ticonderoga practising sorcery and divination to aid the warriors or
learn how it fared with them. Bougainville writes in his Journal on the
fifteenth of October: "Yesterday the old Pottawattamies who have stayed
here 'made medicine' to get news of their brethren. The lodge trembled,
the sorcerer sweated drops of blood, and the devil came at last and told
him that the warriors would come back with scalps and prisoners. A
sorcerer in the medicine lodge is exactly like the Pythoness on the
tripod or the witch Canidia invoking the shades." The diviner was not
wholly at fault. Three days after, the warriors came back with a
prisoner.[463]

[Footnote 463: This kind of divination was practised by Algonkin tribes
from the earliest times.]

Till November, the hostile forces continued to watch each other from the
opposite ends of Lake George. Loudon repeated his orders to Winslow to
keep the defensive, and wrote sarcastically to the Colonial Minister: "I
think I shall be able to prevent the provincials doing anything very
rash, without their having it in their power to talk in the languag