the din of the explosions, and the showers of grapeshot that rattled among the trees, lost their wits and fled.  The blazing dragons hissed and roared, spouted sheets of fire, vomited smoke in black, pitchy volumes and vast illumined clouds, and shed their infernal glare on the distant city, the tents of Montcalm, and the long red lines of the British army, drawn up in array of battle, lest the French should cross from their encampments to attack them in the confusion.  Knox calls the display “the grandest fireworks that can possibly be conceived.”  Yet the fireships did no other harm than burning alive one of their own captains and six or seven of his sailors who failed to escape in their boats.  Some of them ran ashore before reaching the fleet; the others were seized by the intrepid English sailors, who, approaching in their boats, threw grappling-irons upon them and towed them towards land, till they swung round and stranded.  Here, after venting their fury for a while, they subsided into quiet conflagration, which lasted till morning.  Vaudreuil watched the result of his experiment from the steeple of the church at Beauport; then returned, dejected, to Quebec.

Wolfe longed to fight his enemy; but his sagacious enemy would not gratify him.  From the heights of Beauport, the rock of Quebec, or the summit of Cape Diamond, Montcalm could look down on the river and its shores as on a map, and watch each movement of the invaders.  He was hopeful, perhaps confident; and for a month or more he wrote almost daily to Bourlamaque at Ticonderoga, in a cheerful, and often a jocose vein, mingling orders and instructions with pleasantries and bits of news.  Yet his vigilance was unceasing.  “We pass every night in bivouac, or else sleep in our clothes.  Perhaps you are doing as much, my dear Bourlamaque."[714]

[Footnote 714:  Montcalm a Bourlamaque, 27 Juin, 1759. All these letters are before me.]

Of the two commanders, Vaudreuil was the more sanguine, and professed full faith that all would go well.  He too corresponded with Bourlamaque, to whom he gave his opinion, founded on the reports of deserters, that Wolfe had no chance of success unless Amherst should come to his aid.  This he pronounced impossible; and he expressed a strong desire that the English would attack him, “so that we may rid ourselves of them at once."[715] He was courageous, except in the immediate presence of danger, and failed only when the crisis came.

[Footnote 715:  Vaudreuil a Bourlamaque, 8 Juillet, 1759.]

Wolfe, held in check at every other point, had one movement in his power.  He could seize the heights of Point Levi, opposite the city; and this, along with his occupation of the Island of Orleans, would give him command of the Basin of Quebec.  Thence also he could fire on the place across the St. Lawrence, which is here less than a mile wide.  The movement was begun on the afternoon of the twenty-ninth, when,