vaults and storehouses
pillaged, doors and windows riddled everywhere. There was no digging
entrenchments in the frozen earth. Walls six feet thick had been
breached by artillery; and the loose stones, so cold they were, could
hardly be handled.

Among these ruins, on the frozen cliff over the frozen river, Murray
and his seven thousand men settled down to wear the winter through.
They were short of food, short of fuel. Frost-bite maimed them at
first; then scurvy, dysentery, fever, began to kill. They laid their
dead out on the snow, to be buried when spring should return and thaw
the earth; and by the end of April their dead numbered six hundred
and fifty. Yet they kept up their spirits. Early in November there
had been rumours that the French under Levis meant to march on the
city and retake it. In December deserters brought word that he was
on his way--that he would storm the city on the twenty-second, and
dine within the citadel on Christmas Day. In January news arrived
that he was preparing scaling-ladders and training his men in the use
of them. Still the days dragged by. The ice on the river began to
break up and swirl past the ramparts on the tides. The end of April
came, and with it a furious midnight storm, and out of the storm a
feeble cry--the voice of a half-dead Frenchman clinging to a floe of
ice far out on the river. He was rescued, placed in a hammock, and
carried up Mountain Street to the General's quarters; and Murray,
roused from sleep at three o'clock in the morning, listened to his
story. He was an artillery-sergeant of Levis's army; and that army,
twelve thousand strong, was close to the gates of Quebec.

The storm had fallen to a cold drizzle of rain when at dawn Murray's
troops issued from the St. Louis gate and dragged their guns out
through the slush of the St. Foy road. On the ground where Wolfe had
given battle, or hard by, they unlimbered in face of the enemy and
opened fire. Two hours later, outflanked by numbers, having lost a
third of their three thousand in the short fight, they fell back on
the battered walls they had mistrusted. For a few hours the fate of
Quebec hung on a hair. But the garrison could build now; and, while
Levis dragged up his guns from the river, the English worked like
demons. They had guns, at any rate, in plenty; and, while the French
dug and entrenched themselves on the ground they had won, daily the
breaches closed and the English fire grew