Montcalm and Wolfe eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 931 pages of information about Montcalm and Wolfe.

Montcalm and Wolfe eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 931 pages of information about Montcalm and Wolfe.
that they ought to remain with the regiment.  Whatever the soundness of the reason, there was no courtesy in the manner of enforcing it.  “This transaction raised my temper some,” writes Winslow in his Diary; and he proceeds to record his opinion that “it is the most ungenteel, ill-natured thing that ever I saw.”  He sent Monckton a quaintly indignant note, in which he observed that the affair “looks odd, and will appear so in future history;” but his commander, reckless of the judgments of posterity, gave him little satisfaction.

Thus ruffled in spirit, he embarked with his men and sailed down Chignecto Channel to the Bay of Fundy.  Here, while they waited the turn of the tide to enter the Basin of Mines, the shores of Cumberland lay before them dim in the hot and hazy air, and the promontory of Cape Split, like some misshapen monster of primeval chaos, stretched its portentous length along the glimmering sea, with head of yawning rock, and ridgy back bristled with forests.  Borne on the rushing flood, they soon drifted through the inlet, glided under the rival promontory of Cape Blomedon, passed the red sandstone cliffs of Lyon’s Cove, and descried the mouths of the rivers Canard and Des Habitants, where fertile marshes, diked against the tide, sustained a numerous and thriving population.  Before them spread the boundless meadows of Grand Pre, waving with harvests or alive with grazing cattle; the green slopes behind were dotted with the simple dwellings of the Acadian farmers, and the spire of the village church rose against a background of woody hills.  It was a peaceful, rural scene, soon to become one of the most wretched spots on earth.  Winslow did not land for the present, but held his course to the estuary of the River Pisiquid, since called the Avon.  Here, where the town of Windsor now stands, there was a stockade called Fort Edward, where a garrison of regulars under Captain Alexander Murray kept watch over the surrounding settlements.  The New England men pitched their tents on shore, while the sloops that had brought them slept on the soft bed of tawny mud left by the fallen tide.

Winslow found a warm reception, for Murray and his officers had been reduced too long to their own society not to welcome the coming of strangers.  The two commanders conferred together.  Both had been ordered by Lawrence to “clear the whole country of such bad subjects;” and the methods of doing so had been outlined for their guidance.  Having come to some understanding with his brother officer concerning the duties imposed on both, and begun an acquaintance which soon grew cordial on both sides, Winslow embarked again and retraced his course to Grand Pre, the station which the Governor had assigned him.  “Am pleased,” he wrote to Lawrence, “with the place proposed by your Excellency for our reception [the village church].  I have sent for the elders to remove all sacred things, to prevent their being defiled by heretics.”  The church

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Montcalm and Wolfe from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.