gers, had
been content to hold fast and wait until spring should bring him
reinforcements from England. No vigilance on the part of the garrison
was relaxed, and throughout the cold and dreary winter the sentries
marched night and day upon the ramparts.

Towards late spring the increased activity of the besiegers caused a
corresponding restiveness among the many prisoners within the city.
Sir Guy Carleton had treated them with as much liberality as was
possible under the circumstances; but on an attempt on the part of
some of the officers to bribe the guard, he speedily placed the
offenders in irons. On the last day of March a large number of
prisoners made an attempt to escape from the Dauphin barracks, just
inside St. John's Gate. Their plan was to overpower the guard, whose
strength was necessarily small, capture the adjacent city gate, and
hold it open for their comrades on the Plains. The plot was
discovered, however, and the prisoners were transferred to the British
gunboats in the harbour.

As the weeks went by, the anxiety of an ever threatened attack told
heavily on the garrison, and even the convalescent were called upon
for guard-house duty. A blockade extending over four or five months
was exhausting their provisions; and for fuel they were at length
reduced to tearing down wooden houses in the suburb of St. Roch. For
half a year the Richelieu, Montreal, and Three Rivers, in fact the
whole of Canada, had been virtually in the enemy's hands; Quebec alone
remained, but, commanded by Carleton, Quebec was a fortress in the
most real sense.

It was the evening of the 3rd of May, and in the gathering darkness a
ship rounded Point Levi and drew near to the ships in the basin.
Cheers rose from the garrison and a saluting gun boomed from the
citadel. Still the strange craft made no salute, and a heavy crash of
artillery burst from the Grand Battery. For answer, flames leaped up
the rigging and along the bulwarks of the approaching schooner. It was
the _Gaspe_, which the enemy had fitted up as a fire-ship and sent
into the harbour. The crew, being disconcerted by the alert challenge
of the garrison, hastily lighted the fuses and escaped in small boats,
but only to see the impotent fire-ship carried down the river by the
ebbing tide.

Meanwhile, the invading army had drawn near to the ramparts, intending
to assault the town under the confusion caused by the _Gaspe_. To
these dogged troops, steeled for their last