aux coquins!" cried an eager pursuer, who seemed to
direct the operations of the enemy.

"Stand firm, and be ready, my gallant 60ths!" suddenly exclaimed a voice
above them; "wait to see the enemy,--fire low, and sweep the glacis."

"Father! father!" exclaimed a piercing cry from out the mist; "it is I!
Alice! thy own Elsie! spare, O! save your daughters!"

"Hold!" shouted the former speaker, in the awful tones of parental
agony, the sound reaching even to the woods, and rolling back in solemn
echo. "'Tis she! God has restored me my children! Throw open the
sally-port; to the field, 60ths, to the field; pull not a trigger, lest
ye kill my lambs! Drive off these dogs of France with your steel."

Duncan heard the grating of the rusty hinges, and darting to the spot,
directed by the sound, he met a long line of dark red warriors, passing
swiftly towards the glacis. He knew them for his own battalion of the
royal Americans, and flying to their head, soon swept every trace of his
pursuers from before the works.

For an instant, Cora and Alice had stood trembling and bewildered by
this unexpected desertion; but, before either had leisure for speech, or
even thought, an officer of gigantic frame whose locks were bleached
with years and service, but whose air of military grandeur had been
rather softened than destroyed by time, rushed out of the body of the
mist, and folded them to his bosom, while large scalding tears rolled
down his pale and wrinkled cheeks, and he exclaimed, in the peculiar
accent of Scotland,--

"For this I thank thee, Lord! Let danger come as it will, thy servant is
now prepared!"

CHAPTER XV

"Then go we in, to know his embassy;
Which I could, with ready guess, declare,
Before the Frenchman speak a word of it."

_King Henry V._

A few succeeding days were passed amid the privations, the uproar, and
the dangers of the siege, which was vigorously pressed by a power
against whose approaches Munro possessed no competent means of
resistance. It appeared as if Webb, with his army, which lay slumbering
on the banks of the Hudson, had utterly forgotten the strait to which
his countrymen were reduced. Montcalm had filled the woods of the
portage with his savages, every yell and whoop from whom rang through
the British encampment, chilling the hearts of men who were already but
too much disposed to magnify the danger.

Not so, however, with the besieged. Animated by the words, and
sti