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Montcalm left a detachment to hold Ticonderoga; and then, on the first of August, at two in the afternoon, he embarked at the Burned Camp with all his remaining force. Including those with Lévis, the expedition counted about seven thousand six hundred men, of whom more than sixteen hundred were Indians.
They did the American cause far more harm than good. Though I by no means accuse Gaines of treachery, but he was envious of Washington, and so desirous to supersede him that he was ready to sacrifice the cause to that end." "I just wish he'd been sent back to England," said Walter. "But please tell us the rest about the battle, Brother Levis, won't you?" The captain willingly complied.
Lévis had decided to attack the town in the spring, as soon as the French ships were able to come down from near Sorel, where they had been laid up all the winter. Towards the last of April, Murray marched out of the fortress and gave battle at St. Foy to the French army, which largely outnumbered his force.
This latter decree was posted everywhere. A missionary, M. Thomas Morel, was accused of having prevented its publication at Lévis, and was arrested at once and imprisoned in the Château St. Louis with the clerk of the ecclesiastical court, Romain Becquet, who had refused to deliver to the council the registers of this ecclesiastical tribune. He was kept there a month.
It was a face that could have belonged to a country storekeeper in New England, with the same hint of dry humor. The man was dressed in padded levis and a leather jacket of unguessable age. His aspirator seemed worn and patched, and one big hand fumbled with it. "Because we're friends, Doc," the voice drawled at him. "Because you might as well come with us as sit here.
It was indeed a sorry day for the settlement when the inhabitants, on the 16th of August, 1624, saw the white sails of Champlain's vessel disappear behind what is now Point Levis, carrying back, alas! forever, to the shores of her beloved France, Madame de Champlain, sighing for the mystic life of the cloister, tired out by the incessant alarms and the Indian ferocities spread around the Fort during the frequent absences of her husband and her favourite brother, Eustache Bouillé.
There it was, cut clear against the sky, the light shining on its stone buildings, proud and defiant, saying with every new day to those who attacked it that it could not be taken, while Montcalm, De Levis, Bougainville, St. Luc and the others showed all their old skill in defense.
It was long before he was able to speak intelligibly; but at last, being revived by cordials and other remedies, he found strength to tell his benefactors that he was a sergeant of artillery in the army that had come to retake Quebec; that in trying to land a little above Cap-Rouge, his boat had been overset, his companions drowned, and he himself saved by climbing upon the cake of ice where they had discovered him; that he had been borne by the ebb tide down to the Island of Orleans, and then brought up to Quebec by the flow; and, finally, that Lévis was marching on the town with twelve thousand men at his back.
Some of the corps tried to drag off their cannon; but being prevented by the deep mud and snow they spiked the pieces and abandoned them. The French followed close, hoping to cut off the fugitives from the gates of Quebec; till Lévis, seeing that the retreat, though precipitate, was not entirely without order, thought best to stop the pursuit.
Sir John Levis was an armament knight: members of the staff of the British Bolshevist needed not to know more of him than that: the Calvinist minister was either a Calvinist minister, and that was bad, or a master-criminal of the underworld disguised as a Calvinist minister, and that was worse. Or both of these.
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