fire when Ethan Allen, with his two hundred Green
Mountain boys of Vermont, marched across to Lake Champlain in May of
1775, hobnobbed with the guards of Ticonderoga, who drank not wisely
but too well, then rowed by night across the narrows and knocked at the
wicket beside the main gate. The sleepy guards, not yet sober from the
night's carouse, admitted the Vermonters as friends. In rushed the
whole two hundred. In a trice the Canadian garrison of forty-four were
all captured and Allen was thundering on the chamber door of La Place,
the commandant. It was five in the morning. La Place sprang up in his
nightshirt and demanded in whose name he was ordered to surrender.
Ethan Allen answered in words that have gone {299} down to history,
"_In the name of the Great Jehovah and the Continental Congress_."
Later fell Crown Point. So began the war with Canada in the great
Revolution.

And now, from May to September, Arnold's Green Mountain boys sweep from
Lake Champlain down the Richelieu to the St. Lawrence, as Iberville's
bold bushrovers long ago swept through these woods. However, the
American rovers take no permanent occupation of the different forts on
the falls of the Richelieu River, preferring rather to overrun the
parishes, dispatching secret spies and waiting for the habitants to
rally. And they came once too often, once too far, these bold banditti
of the wilderness, clad in buckskin, musket over shoulder, coonskin
cap! Montreal is so full of spies, so full of friendlies, so full of
Bostonnais in sympathy with the revolutionists, that Allen feels safe
in paddling across the St. Lawrence one September morning to the
Montreal side with only one hundred and fifty men. Montreal has grown
in these ten years to a city of some twelve thousand, but the gates are
fast shut against the American scouts; and while Allen waits in some
barns of the suburbs, presto! out sallies Major Garden with twice as
many men armed to the teeth, who assault the barns at a rush. Five
Americans drop at the first crack of the rifles. The Canadians are
preparing to set fire to the barns. Allen's men will be picked off as
they rush from the smoke. Wisely, he saves his Green Mountain boys by
surrender. Thirty-five capitulate. The rest have escaped through the
woods. Carleton refuses to acknowledge the captives as prisoners of
war. He claps irons on their hands and irons on their feet and places
them on a vessel bound for England to