The excellent nuns of the General Hospital are to-day what their predecessors were, and the scene of their useful labors still answers at many points to that described by the careful pen of their military guest.  Throughout the war they and the nuns of the Hotel-Dieu had been above praise in their assiduous devotion to the sick and wounded.

Brigadier Murray, now in command of Quebec, was a gallant soldier, upright, humane, generous, eager for distinction, and more daring than prudent.  He befriended the Canadians, issued strict orders against harming them in person or property, hanged a soldier who had robbed a citizen of Quebec, and severely punished others for slighter offences of the same sort.  In general the soldiers themselves showed kindness towards the conquered people; during harvest they were seen helping them to reap their fields, without compensation, and sharing with them their tobacco and rations.  The inhabitants were disarmed, and required to take the oath of allegiance.  Murray reported in the spring that the whole country, from Cap-Rouge downward, was in subjection to the British Crown.[820]

[Footnote 820:  Murray to Pitt, 25 May, 1760.  Murray, Journal, 1759, 1760.]

Late in October it was rumored that some of the French ships in the river above Quebec were preparing to run by the batteries.  This was the squadron which had arrived in the spring with supplies, and had lain all summer at Batiscan, in the Richelieu, and at other points beyond reach of the English.  After nearly a month of expectancy, they at length appeared, anchored off Sillery on the twenty-first of November, and tried to pass the town on the dark night of the twenty-fourth.  Seven or eight of them succeeded; four others ran aground and were set on fire by their crews, excepting one which was stranded on the south shore and abandoned.  Captain Miller, with a lieutenant and above forty men, boarded her; when, apparently through their own carelessness, she blew up.[821] Most of the party were killed by the explosion, and the rest, including the two officers, were left in a horrible condition between life and death.  Thus they remained till a Canadian, venturing on board in search of plunder, found them, called his neighbors to his aid, carried them to his own house, and after applying, with the utmost kindness, what simple remedies he knew, went over to Quebec and told of the disaster.  Fortunately for themselves, the sufferers soon died.

[Footnote 821:  Murray to Amherst, 25 Jan. 1760.  Not, as some believed, by a train laid by the French.]