s and
transports, carrying five months' provisions, silently and
successfully ran the blockade of the citadel's guns and anchored off
Cap Rouge. On the 5th, Murray, Monckton, and Townshend marched seven
battalions overland from Point Levi to the mouth of the river
Etechemin opposite Sillery Cove; and on the 6th, Wolfe found himself
cruising above the town with twenty-two ships and thirty-six hundred
men.

Meanwhile, Montcalm and Vaudreuil were greatly perplexed and all
unconscious of the new designs and movements of the enemy. The
position at the Point of Orleans still seemed to be strongly occupied,
for every day Colonel Carleton paraded his men up and down in full
view of the camp at Beauport; the batteries at Point Levi thundered
with their accustomed vehemence, and Admiral Saunders's division still
lay threateningly in the basin below the city. Thus the weakening of
these camps by twelve hundred men, who marched up the south shore to
join Wolfe, was not perceived by Montcalm. Above Quebec, Bourlamaque
was not less perplexed by the mysterious movements of Holmes's
squadron and the army transports. Up and down the river they sailed,
now threatening to land at Pointe-aux-Trembles, now at Sillery, and
greatly confusing the right wing of the French army by their complex
movements.

At last the great night came, starlit and serene. The camp-fires of
two armies spotted the shores of the wide river, and the ships lay
like wild-fowl in coveys above the town. At Beauport, an untiring
General of France, who, booted and spurred, through a hundred days had
snatched but a broken sleep, in the ebb of a losing game, now longed
for his adored Candiac, grieved for a beloved daughter's death, sent
cheerful messages to his aged mother and to his wife, and by the
deeper protests of his love, foreshadowed his own doom. At Cap Rouge,
a dying soldier of England, unperturbed and valiant, reached out a
finger to trace the last movement in the desperate campaign of a life
that had opened in Flanders at the age of sixteen, now closing as he
took from his bosom the portrait of his affianced wife, and said to
his old schoolfellow, "Give this to her, Jervis, for we shall meet no
more." Then, passing from the deck, silent and steady, no signs of
pain upon his face--so had the calm come to him as to nature, and to
this beleaguered city, before the whirlwind--he viewed the clustered
groups of boats filled with the flower of his army, settled down