h muskets.
By dawn Papineau and O'Callaghan had fled, and at nine o'clock came
Colonel Gore's loyalist troopers, exhausted from the march, soaked to
the skin, their water-sagged clothes freezing in the cold wind. The
loyalists went into the fight unfed, and with a whoop; but it is not
surprising that the peppering of bullets from the windows drove the
troopers back, and Gore's bugles sounded retreat. Unaware of Gore's
defeat, one Lieutenant Weir has been sent across country with
dispatches. He is captured and bound, and, in a futile attempt to
escape, shot and stabbed to death.

Wetherell comes down the river from Chambly with three hundred men. He
finds St. Charles village protected by outworks of felled trees, and
the houses are literally loopholed with muskets; but Wetherell has
brought cannon along, and the cannon begin to sing on November 25.
Then Wetherell's {430} men charge through the village with leveled
bayonets. The poor habitants scatter like frightened sheep; they
surrender; one hundred perish. It is estimated that on both sides
three hundred are wounded, though some English writers give the list of
wounded as low as forty. Messengers galloped with news of the
patriots' defeat at St. Charles to Dr. Nelson at St. Denis. The
habitants fled to their homes. Nelson was left without a follower. He
escaped to the woods, and for two weeks wandered in the forests of the
boundary, exposed to cold and hunger, not daring to kindle a fire that
would betray him, afraid to let himself sleep for fear of freezing to
death. He was captured near the Vermont line and carried prisoner to
Montreal.

[Illustration: SIR JOHN COLBORNE, GOVERNOR OF CANADA, 1838-1841]

And still worse fared the fortunes of war with the patriots north of
Montreal. Their defense and defeat were almost pitiable in childish
ignorance of what war might mean. Boys' marbles had been gathered
together for bullets. Scythes were carried as swords, and old
flintlocks that had not seen service for twenty years were taken down
from the chimney places. With their bonnets blue hanging down their
backs, rusty firearms over their shoulders, and the village fiddler
leading the march, one thousand "Sons of Liberty" had paraded the
streets of St. Eustache, singing, rollicking, speechifying, unconscious
as {431} children playing war that they were dancing to ruin above a
volcano. Chenier, the beloved country doctor, is their leader. Girod,
the Swiss,