ime to accept a gift of pineapples from the West Indies. She
returned his courtesy by sending him a basket of wine; after which
amenities the cannon roared again. Madame Drucour was a woman of heroic
spirit. Every day she was on the ramparts, where her presence roused the
soldiers to enthusiasm; and every day with her own hand she fired three
cannon to encourage them.

The English lines grew closer and closer, and their fire more and more
destructive. Desgouttes, the naval commander, withdrew the "Arethuse"
from her exposed position, where her fire had greatly annoyed the
besiegers. The shot-holes in her sides were plugged up, and in the dark
night of the fourteenth of July she was towed through the obstructions
in the mouth of the harbor, and sent to France to report the situation
of Louisbourg. More fortunate than her predecessor, she escaped the
English in a fog. Only five vessels now remained afloat in the harbor,
and these were feebly manned, as the greater part of their officers and
crews had come ashore, to the number of two thousand, lodging under
tents in the town, amid the scarcely suppressed murmurs of the army
officers.

On the eighth of July news came that the partisan Boishebert was
approaching with four hundred Acadians, Canadians, and Micmacs to
attack the English outposts and detachments. He did little or nothing,
however, besides capturing a few stragglers. On the sixteenth, early in
the evening, a party of English, led by Wolfe, dashed forward, drove off
a band of French volunteers, seized a rising ground called
Hauteur-de-la-Potence, or Gallows Hill, and began to entrench themselves
scarcely three hundred yards from the Dauphin's Bastion. The town opened
on them furiously with grapeshot; but in the intervals of the firing the
sound of their picks and spades could plainly be heard. In the morning
they were seen throwing up earth like moles as they burrowed their way
forward; and on the twenty-first they opened another parallel, within
two hundred yards of the rampart. Still their sappers pushed on. Every
day they had more guns in position, and on right and left their fire
grew hotter. Their pickets made a lodgment along the foot of the glacis,
and fired up the slope at the French in the covered way.

The twenty-first was a memorable day. In the afternoon a bomb fell on
the ship "Celebre" and set her on fire. An explosion followed. The few
men on board could not save her, and she drifted from her moo