Montgomery’s advance was greatly aided by the little flotilla which Easton had captured at Sorel.  Montgomery met Arnold at Pointe-aux-Trembles, twenty miles above Quebec, on the 2nd of December and supplied his little half-clad force with the British uniforms taken at St Johns and Chambly.  He was greatly pleased with the magnificent physique of Arnold’s men, the fittest of an originally well-picked lot.  He still had some ’pusillanimous wretches’ among his own New Yorkers, who resented the air of superiority affected by Arnold’s New Englanders and Morgan’s Virginians.  He felt a well-deserved confidence in Livingston and some of the English-speaking Canadian ‘patriots’ whom Livingston had brought into his camp before St Johns in September.  But he began to feel more and more doubtful about the French Canadians, most of whom began to feel more and more doubtful about themselves.  On the 6th he arrived before Quebec and took up his quarters in Holland House, two miles beyond the walls, at the far end of the Plains of Abraham.  The same day he sent Carleton the following summons: 

SIR;—­Notwithstanding the personal ill-treatment I have received at your hands—­notwithstanding your cruelty to the unhappy Prisoners you have taken, the feelings of humanity induce me to have recourse to this expedient to save you from the Destruction which hangs over you.  Give me leave, Sir, to assure you that I am well acquainted with your situation.  A great extent of works, in their nature incapable of defence, manned with a motley crew of sailors, the greatest part our friends; of citizens, who wish to see us within their walls, & a few of the worst troops who ever stiled themselves Soldiers.  The impossibility of relief, and the certain prospect of wanting every necessary of life, should your opponents confine their operations to a simple Blockade, point out the absurdity of resistance.  Such is your situation!  I am at the head of troops accustomed to Success, confident of the righteousness of the cause they are engaged in, inured to danger, & so highly incensed at your inhumanity, illiberal abuse, and the ungenerous means employed to prejudice them in the mind of the Canadians that it is with difficulty I restrain them till my Batteries are ready from assaulting your works, which afford them a fair opportunity of ample vengeance and just retaliation.  Firing upon a flag of truce, hitherto unprecedented, even among savages, prevents my taking the ordinary mode of communicating my sentiments.  However, I will at any rate acquit my conscience.  Should you persist in an unwarrantable defence, the consequences be upon your own head.  Beware of destroying stores of any kind, Publick or Private, as you have done at Montreal and in Three Rivers—­If you do, by Heaven, there will be no mercy shown.

Though Montgomery wrote bunkum like the common politician of that and many a later age, he was really a brave soldier.  What galled him into fury was ‘grave