of summer rain that inundated the tents.  Along the river, from the Montmorenci to Point Levi, there were ceaseless artillery fights between gunboats, frigates, and batteries on shore.  Bands of Indians infested the outskirts of the camps, killing sentries and patrols.  The rangers chased them through the woods; there were brisk skirmishes, and scalps lost and won.  Sometimes the regulars took part in these forest battles; and once it was announced, in orders of the day, that “the General has ordered two sheep and some rum to Captain Cosnan’s company of grenadiers for the spirit they showed this morning in pushing those scoundrels of Indians.”  The Indians complained that the British soldiers were learning how to fight, and no longer stood still in a mass to be shot at, as in Braddock’s time.  The Canadian coureurs-de-bois mixed with their red allies and wore their livery.  One of them was caught on the eighteenth.  He was naked, daubed red and blue, and adorned with a bunch of painted feathers dangling from the top of his head.  He and his companions used the scalping-knife as freely as the Indians themselves; nor were the New England rangers much behind them in this respect, till an order came from Wolfe forbidding “the inhuman practice of scalping, except when the enemy are Indians, or Canadians dressed like Indians.”

A part of the fleet worked up into the Basin, beyond the Point of Orleans; and here, on the warm summer nights, officers and men watched the cannon flashing and thundering from the heights of Montmorenci on one side, and those of Pont Levi on the other, and the bombs sailing through the air in fiery semicircles.  Often the gloom was lighted up by the blaze of the burning houses of Quebec, kindled by incendiary shells.  Both the lower and the upper town were nearly deserted by the inhabitants, some retreating into the country, and some into the suburb of St. Roch; while the Ursulines and Hospital nuns abandoned their convents to seek harborage beyond the range of shot.  The city was a prey to robbers, who pillaged the empty houses, till an order came from headquarters promising the gallows to all who should be caught.  News reached the French that Niagara was attacked, and that the army of Amherst was moving against Ticonderoga.  The Canadians deserted more and more.  They were disheartened by the defensive attitude in which both Vaudreuil and Montcalm steadily persisted; and accustomed as they were to rapid raids, sudden strokes, and a quick return to their homes, they tired of long weeks of inaction.  The English patrols caught one of them as he was passing the time in fishing.  “He seemed to be a subtle old rogue,” says Knox, “of seventy years of age, as he told us.  We plied him well with port wine, and then his heart was more open; and seeing that we laughed at the exaggerated accounts he had given us, he said he ’wished the affair was well over, one way or the other; that his countrymen were all discontented, and would either surrender, or disperse and act a neutral part, if it were not for the persuasions of their priests and the fear of being maltreated by the savages, with whom they are threatened on all occasions.’” A deserter reported on the nineteenth of July that nothing but dread of the Indians kept the Canadians in the camp.