with the Wood Creek of Lake Champlain.  Thither the bateaux were dragged on sledges and launched on the dark and tortuous stream, which, fed by a decoction of forest leaves that oozed from the marshy shores, crept in shadow through depths of foliage, with only a belt of illumined sky gleaming between the jagged tree-tops.  Tall and lean with straining towards the light, their rough, gaunt stems trickling with perpetual damps, stood on either hand the silent hosts of the forest.  The skeletons of their dead, barkless, blanched, and shattered, strewed the mudbanks and shallows; others lay submerged, like bones of drowned mammoths, thrusting lank, white limbs above the sullen water; and great trees, entire as yet, were flung by age or storms athwart the current,—­a bristling barricade of matted boughs.  There was work for the axe as well as for the oar; till at length Lake Oneida opened before them, and they rowed all day over its sunny breast, reached the outlet, and drifted down the shallow eddies of the Onondaga, between walls of verdure, silent as death, yet haunted everywhere with ambushed danger.  It was twenty days after leaving Schenectady when they neared the mouth of the river; and Lake Ontario greeted them, stretched like a sea to the pale brink of the northern sky, while on the bare hill at their left stood the miserable little fort of Oswego.

Shirley’s whole force soon arrived; but not the needful provisions and stores.  The machinery of transportation and the commissariat was in the bewildered state inevitable among a peaceful people at the beginning of a war; while the news of Braddock’s defeat produced such an effect on the boatmen and the draymen at the carrying-places, that the greater part deserted.  Along with these disheartening tidings, Shirley learned the death of his eldest son, killed at the side of Braddock.  He had with him a second son, Captain John Shirley, a vivacious young man, whom his father and his father’s friends in their familiar correspondence always called “Jack.”  John Shirley’s letters give a lively view of the situation.

“I have sat down to write to you,”—­thus he addresses Governor Morris, of Pennsylvania, who seems to have had a great liking for him,—­“because there is an opportunity of sending you a few lines; and if you will promise to excuse blots, interlineations, and grease (for this is written in the open air, upon the head of a pork-barrel, and twenty people about me), I will begin another half-sheet.  We are not more than about fifteen hundred men fit for duty; but that I am pretty sure, if we can go in time in our sloop, schooner, row-galleys, and whaleboats, will be sufficient to take Frontenac; after which we may venture to go upon the attack of Niagara, but not before.  I have not the least doubt with myself of knocking down both these places yet this fall, if we can get away in a week.  If we take or destroy their two vessels at Frontenac, and ruin their harbor there, and destroy the two forts of that and Niagara,