ng fifty soldiers each. Vincent takes his courage in his
teeth and gathers his one thousand men inside the walls. Then the
cannon of the frigates split fog and air and earth, and, under cover of
the fire, the scows gain the land by 9 A.M. First, Vincent's
sharpshooters sally from the fort and fire; then they fire from the
walls; then they overturn guns, retreat from the walls, throw what
powder they cannot carry into the water, and retreat, fighting, behind
stone walls and ditches. The contest of one thousand against six
thousand is hopeless. Vincent sends coureurs riding like the wind to
Chippewa and Queenston and Erie, ordering the Canadians to retire to
the Back Country. By four o'clock in the afternoon Americans are in
possession of the Canadian side from Fort George to Erie. Vincent
retreats at quick march along the lake shore towards what is now
Hamilton. June 1 General Dearborn sends his officers, Chandler and
Winder, in hot pursuit with thirty-five hundred men.

Vincent's soldiers have less than ninety rounds of powder to a man. He
has only one thousand men, for the garrisons of {357} Chippewa and
Queenston Heights and Erie have fallen back in a circle to the region
of St. David's. June 5, Vincent's Canadians are in camp at Burlington
Bay. Only seven miles away, at Stony Creek, lies the American army,
out sentries posted at a church, artillery on a height commanding a
field, officers and men asleep in the long grass. Humanly speaking,
nothing could prevent a decisive battle the next day. The two American
officers, Chandler and Winder, sit late into the night, candles alight
over camp stools, mapping out what they think should be the campaign.
It is a hot night,--muggy, with June showers lighted up by an
occasional flash of sheet lightning. Then all candles out, and pitch
darkness, and silence as of a desert! The American army is asleep,--in
the dead sleep of men exhausted from long, hard, swift marching. The
artillerymen on the hillocks, the sentries, the outposts at the
church,--they, too, are sound asleep!

[Illustration: FITZGIBBONS]

But the Canadians, too, know that, humanly speaking, nothing can
prevent a decisive battle on the morrow. The stories run--I do not
vouch for their truth, though facts seem to point to some such
explanation--that Harvey, a Canadian officer, had come back to the
American army that night disguised as a Quaker peddling potatoes, and
noted the unguarded conditi