on.

Meanwhile, zigzag trenches crept closer and closer to the walls, upon
which the heavy artillery now played at short range with deadly
effect. Bombs and grenades hissed over the shattering ramparts and
burst in the crowded streets; roundshot and grape tore their way
through the wooden barracks; while mortars and musketry poured a hail
of shell and bullet upon the brave defenders. Nothing could save
Louisbourg now that Pitt's policy of Thorough had got headway. On the
26th of July a white flag fluttered over the Dauphin's Bastion; and by
midnight of that date Drucour had signed Amherst's terms enjoining
unconditional surrender.

Then the work of demolition commenced. The mighty fortress, which had
cast a dark shadow over New England for almost half a century, "the
Dunkirk of America," must stand no longer as a menace. An army of
workmen laboured for months with pick and spade and blasting-powder
upon those vast fortifications; yet nothing but an upheaval of nature
itself could obliterate all traces of earthwork, ditch, _glacis_, and
casemate, which together made up the frowning fortress of Louisbourg.
To-day grass grows on the Grand Parade, and daisies blow upon the
turf-grown bastions; but who may pick his way over those historic
mounds of earth without a sigh for the buried valour of bygone years!

In the Richelieu valley, meanwhile, the armies of England and France
had met in even fiercer conflict. Montcalm lay intrenched at Carillon
at the head of the battalions of La Sarre, Languedoc, Berry, Royal
Roussillon, La Reine, Bearn, and Guienne, three thousand six hundred
men in all. To this high rocky battlement overlooking Lake Champlain,
the French had hastily added a rugged outwork of felled trees on the
crest of a flanking hill. The ridge thus fortified now looked down
upon a valley stripped of its timber, but covered with rugged stumps
and a maze of stakes and branches, which, while affording no cover for
an enemy, presented insuperable obstacles to his advance.

On came Abercrombie at the head of fifteen thousand men, offering the
most imposing military spectacle yet seen in the New World. They
advanced in three divisions--the regulars in the centre, commanded by
the gallant Lord Howe, and a blue column of provincials on either
flank. To the martial music of their bands or the shrill notes of the
bagpipe they gaily marched through the midsummer woods, the
Forty-Second Highlanders in the van.

As the army d