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Slop, the curtins my brother Shandy mentions here, have nothing to do with beadsteads; tho', I know Du Cange says, 'That bed-curtains, in all probability, have taken their name from them; nor have the horn-works he speaks of, any thing in the world to do with the horn-works of cuckoldom: But the Curtin, Sir, is the word we use in fortification, for that part of the wall or rampart which lies between the two bastions and joins them Besiegers seldom offer to carry on their attacks directly against the curtin, for this reason, because they are so well flanked.
Vast and irregular it is at its two ends, toward the colonnade and toward the bastions of the city, but the intervening length consists of two perfectly parallel buildings, each over three hundred and fifty yards long, about eighty yards apart, and yoked in the middle by the Braccio Nuovo of the Museum and a part of the library, so as to enclose two vast courts, the one known as Belvedere, not to be confused with the Belvedere in the Museum, and the other called the Garden of the Pigna, from the pine-cone which stands at one end of it.
Farewell, my son. May God bless you and keep you and bring your enterprise to a happy termination." After the canoe had departed, Major Hester ascended one of the water bastions, where he watched it until it became a tiny speck, and finally vanished behind the projecting land then known as Montreal point.
Before long he resolved to attempt the assault. Fort St. Philip towered up proudly on an enormous mass of rock; the French regiments flung themselves into the fosses, setting against the ramparts ladders that were too short; the soldiers mounted upon one another's shoulders, digging their bayonets into the interstices between the stones; the boldest were already at the top of the bastions.
It is situated on an isolated rock, and every five years relieved with men, provisions, and ammunition; the flanks of the bastions are armed with ponderous wall pieces, requiring three men to work them. Chambers are also bored in the live rock, from whence enormous masses of stone might be discharged on an assailing foe. A march of eighteen miles brought us on the 19th July to Koollum.
"Why, you can see it from here," replied he. I began looking all round, expecting to see high bastions, a wall, and a ditch. I saw nothing but a little village, surrounded by a wooden palisade. On one side three or four haystacks, half covered with snow; on another a tumble-down windmill, whose sails, made of coarse limetree bark, hung idly down. "But where is the fort?" I asked, in surprise.
"It is the name given to that part of the rampart which connects the flanks of two bastions," replied her father. "And it was here that the Apaches were imprisoned," remarked Walter. "Yes," returned his mother, "and a most gloomy prison it must have proved to them, used as they were to the free life of the mountains, prairies, and forests."
Mulvaney had not seen fit to recognise me; so I knew that his trouble must be heavy upon him. I climbed one of the bastions and watched the figures of the Three Musketeers grow smaller and smaller across the plain. They were walking as fast as they could put foot to the ground, and their heads were bowed.
Besides the two forts of St. Maria and St. Philip, which terminated the bridge on either shore, and the two wooden bastions on the bridge itself, which were filled with soldiers and mounted with guns on all sides, each of the two-and-thirty vessels was manned with thirty soldiers and four sailors, and showed the cannon's mouth to the enemy, whether he carne up from Zealand or down from Antwerp.
Then, with the lieutenant and two New Englanders to witness capitulation, he marched from the gates to do the same with the ship. Allemand and Godefroy kept sentinel duty at the gates. La Chesnaye, Forêt, and Jack Battle held the bastions, and the rest stood guard in front of the main building. From my place I saw how it happened.
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