Amherst made his camp just beyond range of the French cannon, and Flat Point Cove was chosen as the landing-place of guns and stores.  Clearing the ground, making roads, and pitching tents filled the rest of the day.  At night there was a glare of flames from the direction of the town.  The French had abandoned the Grand Battery after setting fire to the buildings in it and to the houses and fish-stages along the shore of the harbor.  During the following days stores were landed as fast as the surf would permit:  but the task was so difficult that from first to last more than a hundred boats were stove in accomplishing it; and such was the violence of the waves that none of the siege-guns could be got ashore till the eighteenth.  The camp extended two miles along a stream that flowed down to the Cove among the low, woody hills that curved around the town and harbor.  Redoubts were made to protect its front, and blockhouses to guard its left and rear from the bands of Acadians known to be hovering in the woods.

Wolfe, with twelve hundred men, made his way six or seven miles round the harbor, took possession of the battery at Lighthouse Point which the French had abandoned, planted guns and mortars, and opened fire on the Island Battery that guarded the entrance.  Other guns were placed at different points along the shore, and soon opened on the French ships.  The ships and batteries replied.  The artillery fight raged night and day; till on the twenty-fifth the island guns were dismounted and silenced.  Wolfe then strengthened his posts, secured his communications, and returned to the main army in front of the town.

Amherst had reconnoitred the ground and chosen a hillock at the edge of the marsh, less than half a mile from the ramparts, as the point for opening his trenches.  A road with an epaulement to protect it must first be made to the spot; and as the way was over a tract of deep mud covered with water-weeds and moss, the labor was prodigious.  A thousand men worked at it day and night under the fire of the town and ships.

When the French looked landward from their ramparts they could see scarcely a sign of the impending storm.  Behind them Wolfe’s cannon were playing busily from Lighthouse Point and the heights around the harbor; but, before them, the broad flat marsh and the low hills seemed almost a solitude.  Two miles distant, they could descry some of the English tents; but the greater part were hidden by the inequalities of the ground.  On the right, a prolongation of the harbor reached nearly half a mile beyond the town, ending in a small lagoon formed by a projecting sandbar, and known as the Barachois.  Near this bar lay moored the little frigate “Arethuse,” under a gallant officer named Vauquelin.  Her position was a perilous one; but so long as she could maintain it she could sweep with her fire the ground before the works, and seriously impede the operations of the enemy.  The other naval captains were less