aham. He had the sad
consolation of having been one of those who bore the wounded Marquis
from the field, and accompanied him to the Hospice of the Ursulines
where he died, and where his glorious remains still rest. This
circumstance saved him from the ignominy of capture. Before Murray, the
successor of Wolfe, entered the vanquished city in triumph, he effected
his escape by creeping along the valley of the St. Charles during the
darkness, and making his way into the country. After wandering some
miles, he paused near the Falls of Montmorenci, and built himself a kind
of rustic tent on the very spot where he afterwards erected his lonely
cabin. He chose this place not only on account of the beauty of its
scenery, and the shelter from hostile intrusion which it afforded, but
also because it was in the immediate neighborhood of the
fortifications--visible even to this day--which his beloved commander
had constructed there, and from which he repulsed Wolfe with great loss,
only two months before the disastrous battle of the Plains of Abraham.

"Alas!" Batoche would often exclaim, standing over those earthworks, "if
the great Marquis had relied upon the walls of Quebec, as he did upon
these fortifications, we should still be masters of the country. Wolfe
owed his success solely to the imprudence of Montcalm."

In the spring of the following year, Batoche joined the army of the
Chevalier de Levis, and was present at the great victory of Ste. Foye.
But the successful retreat of the British army, under Murray, behind the
walls of Quebec; the inability of Levis to press the siege of the city;
the gradual disbanding of the French forces throughout the Province, and
the final surrender of Vaudreuil, at Montreal, whereby the whole French
possessions in America, were ceded to Britain--one of the most momentous
events of modern times in its gradual results--forced Batoche to return
to his Montmorenci solitude.

He might have gone back to France, if he had been so minded, but after
lingering some time in indecision, a circumstance occurred which
determined him to fix his abode definitively in the new world. This was
the receipt of a letter from his family, informing him of the death of
his wife and the utter poverty in which his daughter, a girl of
seventeen, was left. The girl herself appended a note stating that she
intended to sail by the first occasion to join her father in Canada. The
old soldier wrote at once to dissuade her