ardor with which each lent himself to exertion, and sought to supply deficiency with zeal.  The feelings of the gallant officer in this position—­on the one hand, sensible that to him was confided the task of upholding the supremacy of his country’s flag, and on the other, compelled to confess the inadequacy of the means placed at his disposal for this object—­may be easily understood.  That his men were brave he knew, but mere bravery would not suffice in a contest where the skill of the seamen, not less than brute courage, must be called into requisition.  He had reason to know that his enemy would not merely bring stout hearts into the conflict, but active hands—­men whose lives had been passed on the restless waters of ocean, and whose training had been perfected in the battle and the tempest, while nine tenths of his own crews had never planted foot beyond the limit of the lake on which the merits and resources of both would be so shortly tested.  But “aut agere aut mori,” was his motto, and of the appropriateness of this his actions have formed the most striking illustration.

The day on which the Council relative to the proposed expedition to the Miami was held, was characterized by one of those sudden outbursts of elemental war, so common to the Canadas in early summer—­and, which, in awful grandeur of desolation, are frequently scarcely interior to the hurricanes of the tropics.  The morning had been oppressively sultry, and there was that general and heavy lethargy of nature that usually precedes a violent reaction.  About noon, a small dark speck was visible in the hitherto cloudless horizon, and this presently grew in size until the whole western sky was one dense mass of threatening black, which eventually spread itself over the entire surface of the heavens, leaving not a hand’s breadth any where visible.  Presently, amid the sultry stillness that prevailed, there came a slight breeze over the face of the waters, and then, as if some vast battering train had suddenly opened its hundred mouths of terror, vomiting forth showers of grape and other missiles, came astounding thunder-claps, and forked lightnings, and rain, and hail, and whistling wind—­all in such terrible union, yet such fearful disorder, that man, the last to take warning, or feel awed by the anger of the common parent, Nature, bent his head in lowliness and silence to her voice, and awaited tremblingly the passing away of her wrath.

Henry Grantham, whose turn of duty had again brought him to Amherstburg, was in the mess-room of the garrison when the storm was at the fiercest.  Notwithstanding the excitement of the Council scene, at which he had been present, he had experienced an unusual depression throughout the day, originating partly in the languid state of the atmosphere, but infinitely more in the anxiety under which he labored in regard to his brother, of whom no other intelligence had been received, since his departure with his prisoners for Buffalo, than