[Footnote 506:  Lettre du Pere Roubaud, 21 Oct. 1757.  Roubaud, who saw the whole, says that twelve hundred Indians joined the chase, and that their yells were terrific.]

[Footnote 507:  The remains of Fort William Henry are now—­1882—­crowded between a hotel and the wharf and station of a railway.  While I write, a scheme is on foot to level the whole for other railway structures.  When I first knew the place the ground was in much the same state as in the time of Montcalm.]

The Indian who was killed was a noted chief of the Nipissings; and his tribesmen howled in grief for their bereavement.  They painted his face with vermilion, tied feathers in his hair, hung pendants in his ears and nose, clad him in a resplendent war-dress, put silver bracelets on his arms, hung a gorget on his breast with a flame colored ribbon, and seated him in state on the top of a hillock, with his lance in his hand, his gun in the hollow of his arm, his tomahawk in his belt, and his kettle by his side.  Then they all crouched about him in lugubrious silence.  A funeral harangue followed; and next a song and solemn dance to the booming of the Indian drum.  In the gray of the morning they buried him as he sat, and placed food in the grave for his journey to the land of souls.[508]

[Footnote 508:  Lettre du Pere Roubaud.]

As the sun rose above the eastern mountains the French camp was all astir.  The column of Levis, with Indians to lead the way, moved through the forest towards the fort, and Montcalm followed with the main body; then the artillery boats rounded the point that had hid them from the sight of the English, saluting them as they did so with musketry and cannon; while a host of savages put out upon the lake, ranged their canoes abreast in a line from shore to shore, and advanced slowly, with measured paddle-strokes and yells of defiance.

The position of the enemy was full in sight before them.  At the head of the lake, towards the right, stood the fort, close to the edge of the water.  On its left was a marsh; then the rough piece of ground where Johnson had encamped two years before; then a low, flat, rocky hill, crowned with an entrenched camp; and, lastly, on the extreme left, another marsh.  Far around the fort and up the slopes of the western mountain the forest had been cut down and burned, and the ground was cumbered with blackened stumps and charred carcasses and limbs of fallen trees, strewn in savage disorder one upon another.[509] This was the work of Winslow in the autumn before.  Distant shouts and war-cries, the clatter of musketry, white puffs of smoke in the dismal clearing and along the scorched edge of the bordering forest, told that Levis’ Indians were skirmishing with parties of the English, who had gone out to save the cattle roaming in the neighborhood, and burn some out-buildings that would have favored the besiegers.  Others were taking down the tents that stood on a plateau near the foot of the mountain on the right, and moving them to the entrenchment on the hill.  The garrison sallied from the fort to support their comrades, and for a time the firing was hot.