quarter of the rampart which overlooked the eastern extremity of Hog Island.  Hitherto, however, their eager watching had been in vain.  As far as our recollection of the Canadian tradition of this story serves us, it must have been on the fourth night after the final discomfiture of the plans of Ponteac, and the tenth from the departure of the adventurers, that the officers were assembled in the mess-room, partaking of the scanty and frugal supper to which their long confinement had reduced them.  The subject of their conversation, as it was ever of their thoughts, was the probable fate of their companions; and many and various, although all equally melancholy, were the conjectures offered as to the result.  There was on the countenance of each, that deep and fixed expression of gloom, which, if it did not indicate any unmanliness of despair, told at least that hope was nearly extinct:  but more especially was this remarkable in the young but sadly altered Charles de Haldimar, who, with a vacant eye and a pre-occupied manner, seemed wholly abstracted from the scene before him.

All was silence in the body of the fort.  The men off duty had long since retired to rest in their clothes, and only the “All’s well!” of the sentinels was heard at intervals of a quarter of an hour, as the cry echoed from mouth to mouth in the line of circuit.  Suddenly, however, between two of those intervals, and during a pause in the languid conversation of the officers, the sharp challenge of a sentinel was heard, and then quick steps on the rampart, as of men hastening to the point whence the challenge had been given.  The officers, whom this new excitement seemed to arouse into fresh activity, hurriedly quitted the room; and, with as little noise as possible, gained the spot where the voice had been heard.  Several men were bending eagerly over the rampart, and, with their muskets at the recover, riveting their gaze on a dark and motionless object that lay on the verge of the ditch immediately beneath them.

“What have you here, Mitchell?” asked Captain Blessington, who was in command of the guard, and who had recognised the gruff voice of the veteran in the challenge just given.

“An American burnt log, your honour,” muttered the soldier, “if one was to judge from its stillness; but if it is, it must have rolled there within the last minute; for I’ll take my affidavy it wasn’t here when I passed last in my beat.”

“An American burnt log, indeed! it’s some damned rascal of a spy, rather,” remarked Captain Erskine.  “Who knows but it may be our big friend, come to pay us a visit again?  And yet he is not half long enough for him, either.  Can’t you try and tickle him with the bayonet, any of you fellows, and see whether he is made of flesh and blood?”