pted to fetch it from the river; and no
more than thirty-five hundred men could be mustered to repel an
assault;--a crisis had now been reached which loudly called on the
British general, in the name of humanity, to desist from further efforts
to maintain so hopeless a struggle.

Burgoyne called his officers together in council. The absence of such
men as Frazer, Baum, Breyman, Ackland, Clarke, and others from the
meeting, must have brought home to the commanding general, as nothing
else could, a sense of the calamities that had befallen him; while the
faces of the survivors no less ominously prefigured those to come. A
heavy cannonade was in progress. Even while the council was
deliberating, a cannon-ball crashed through the room among them, as if
to enjoin haste in bringing the proceedings to a close. The council
listened to what was already but too well known. Already the finger of
fate pointed undeviatingly to the inevitable result. A general lassitude
had fallen upon the spirits of the soldiers. The situation was
manifestly hopeless to all.

There could be but one opinion. Enough had been done for honor. All were
agreed that only a surrender could save the army.

[Sidenote: Oct. 14.]

Without more delay, an officer was sent to General Gates. At first he
would listen only to an unconditional surrender. This was indignantly
rejected. Two days of suspense followed to both armies. Indeed, the
vanquished seemed dictating terms to the conqueror. But if the British
dreaded a renewal of hostilities, the Americans knew that Clinton's
forces[57] were nearing Albany from below. Gates lowered his demands.
The British army was allowed the honors of war, with liberty to return
to England, on condition of not serving against the United States during
the war. These terms were agreed to, and the treaty was duly signed on
the seventeenth.

Burgoyne's situation when gathering up his trophies, and issuing his
presumptuous proclamation at Ticonderoga, compared with the straits to
which his reverses had now brought him--a failure before his king and
country, a captain stripped of his laurels by the hand he professed to
despise, a petitioner for the clemency of his conqueror--affords a
striking example of the uncertain chances of war. It really seemed as if
fortune had only raised Burgoyne the higher in order that his fall might
be the more destructive at last.

[Illustration: WHERE THE SURRENDER TOOK PLACE.]

FOOTNOTES:

[53]