nds about the danger of Monckton's guns,
though not a shot had yet been fired, and agitated loudly for a sortie
across the river. Montcalm thought poorly of the plan; but a
miscellaneous force of fifteen hundred Canadians, possessed of more
ardor than cohesion, insisted on attempting a night assault. They landed
some way up the river, but did not so much as reach the British
position. The difficulties of a combined midnight movement were
altogether too great for such irregulars, and they ended by firing upon
one another in the dark and stampeding for their boats, with a loss of
seventy killed and wounded.

Two brigades were now in midstream on the Isle of Orleans and one on
Point Levis. Landing artillery and stores, intrenching both positions,
and mounting siege-guns at the last-named one consumed the first few
days of July. Wolfe's skill in erecting and firing batteries had been
abundantly demonstrated at Louisburg; and though his head quarters were
on the island, he went frequently to superintend the preparations for
the bombardment of Quebec. On July 12th a rocket leaped into the sky
from Wolfe's camp. It was the signal for the forty guns and mortars that
had been mounted on Point Levis to open on the city that Vaudreuil and
his friends had fondly thought was out of range. The first few shots may
have encouraged the delusion, as they fell short; but the gunners
quickly got their distance, and then began that storm of shot and shell
which rained upon the doomed city, with scarce a respite, for upward of
eight weeks.

Houses, churches, and monasteries crashed and crumbled beneath the
pitiless discharge. The great cathedral, where the memories and the
trophies of a century's defiance of the accursed heretic had so thickly
gathered, was gradually reduced to a skeleton of charred walls. The
church of Notre Dame de la Victoire, erected in gratitude for the
delivery of the city from the last and only previous attack upon it
sixty years before, was one of the first buildings to suffer from the
far more serious punishment of this one. Wolfe, though already suffering
from more than his chronic ill-health, was ubiquitous and indefatigable;
now behind Monckton's guns at Point Levis, now with Townshend's
batteries at Montmorency, now up the river, ranging with his glass
those miles of forbidding cliffs which he may already have begun to
think he should one day have to climb. Some of Saunders' ships were in
the Basin, between Or