Champlain. A small French
rear-guard loitered here; but two companies of riflemen were landed
and drove it back into the woods, without loss. The boats discharged
the British unopposed, who now set forward afoot through the forest
to follow the left bank of the stream, which, leaving the lake
tranquilly, is broken presently by stony rapids and grows smooth
again only as it nears its new reservoir. Smooth, rapid, and smooth
again, it sweeps round a long bend; and this bend the British
prepared to follow, leaving a force to guard the boats.

Howe led, feeling forward with his light infantry; and the army
followed in much the same disposition they had held down the lake;
regulars in the centre, provincials on either flank; a long scarlet
body creeping with broad blue wings--or so it might have appeared to
a bird with sight able to pierce the overlacing boughs. To John a
Cleeve, warily testing the thickets with the butt of his staff and
pulling the thorns aside lest they should rip its precious silken
folds, the advance, after the first ten minutes, seemed to keep no
more order than a gang of children pressing after blackberries.
Somewhere on his right the rapids murmured; men struggled beside
him--now a dozen redcoats, now a few knowing Provincials who had lost
their regiments, but were cocksure of the right path. And always--
before, behind and all around him--sounded the calls of the
parade-ground:--"Sub-divisions--left front--mark time! Left, half
turn! Three files on the left--left turn--wheel!--files to the
front!" Singular instructions for men grappling with a virgin
forest!

If the standing trees were bad, the fallen ones--and there seemed to
be a diabolical number of them--were ten times worse. John was
straddling the trunk of one and cursing vehemently when a sound
struck on his ears, more intelligible than any parade-call. It came
back to him from the front: the sharp sound of musketry--two volleys.

The parade-calls ceased suddenly all around him. He listened, still
sitting astride the trunk. One or two redcoats leaped it, shouting
as they leaped, and followed the sound, which crackled now as though
the whole green forest were on fire. By and by, as he listened, a
mustachioed man in a short jacket--one of Gage's light infantry--came
bursting through the undergrowth, capless, shouting for a surgeon.

"What's wrong in front?" asked John, as the man--scarcely regarding
him--laid his hands on the t