merchant service, but ready to fight
if occasion offered. Altogether nearly thirty thousand men now left the
shores of England to attack Canada.

There is a touch of doom for France in the fact that its own lost
fortress of Louisbourg was to be the rendezvous of the fleet. Saunders,
however, arrived so early that the entrance to Louisbourg was still
blocked with ice, and he went on to Halifax. In time he returned to
Louisbourg, and from there the great fleet sailed for Quebec. The
voyage was uneventful. We can picture the startled gaze of the Canadian
peasants as they saw the stately array, many miles long, pass up the
St. Lawrence. On the 26th of June, Wolfe and Saunders were in the basin
before Quebec and the great siege had begun which was to mark one of the
turning-points in history.

Nature had furnished a noble setting for the drama now to be enacted.
Quebec stands on a bold semicircular rock on the north shore of the St.
Lawrence. At the foot of the rock sweeps the mighty river, here at the
least breadth in its whole course, but still a flood nearly a mile wide,
deep and strong. Its currents change ceaselessly with the ebb and flow
of the tide which rises a dozen feet, though the open sea is eight
hundred miles away. Behind the rock of Quebec the small stream of the
St. Charles furnishes a protection on the landward side. Below the
fortress, the great river expands into a broad basin with the outflow
divided by the Island of Orleans. In every direction there are cliffs
and precipices and rising ground. From the north shore of the great
basin the land slopes gradually into a remote blue of wooded mountains.
The assailant of Quebec must land on low ground commanded everywhere
from heights for seven or eight miles on the east and as many on the
west. At both ends of this long front are further natural defenses--at
the east the gorge of the Montmorency River, at the west that of the Cap
Rouge River.

Wolfe's desire was to land his army on the Beauport shore at some point
between Quebec and Montmorency. But Montcalm's fortified posts, behind
which lay his army, stretched along the shore for six miles, all the way
from the Montmorency to the St. Charles. Wolfe had a great contempt for
Montcalm's army--"five feeble French battalions mixed with undisciplined
peasants." If only he could get to close quarters with the "wily and
cautious old fox," as he called Montcalm! Already the British had done
what the French had t