a small party of colonial soldiers, about two miles from the battle-field, and defeated with the loss of all their baggage and artillery. Thus ended the battle of Lake George, an engagement, small in the number of the forces employed, but great in its effect upon the feeling of the country, which, for the first time, began to believe that the tide had turned, and that the power of France in North America was about to ebb.

Two years later, indeed, the great Montcalm himself attacked and, after a siege of six days, succeeded in wresting Fort William Henry from the English, who, though vastly outnumbered, terminated a gallant defence by an honourable capitulation. But the French general, to his eternal disgrace, took no proper care that the terms of this surrender should be observed. His savage allies were permitted to butcher the sick and wounded as they were passing out of the fort, while the fort itself was burnt and many of its brave defenders thrown alive into the flames. An escort of only three hundred men was provided to guard the prisoners of war, who were accordingly slain on the march to Quebec, men, women and children, to the number of fifteen hundred, by the Indians, who swarmed in the woods bordering their route. Eager to revenge this massacre, the English, in 1758, despatched Abercrombie, with fifteen thousand troops, for the purpose of driving the French from Ticonderoga and Fort Frederic; but he failed utterly and ingloriously of his object from want of military skill. Finally, it

was left for Amherst to reduce both these places in the following year, and thus to break, for ever, the hold of France on the lakes.

It is difficult to imagine any two contiguous sheets of water more unlike than Lakes George and Champlain. The latter extends, northward from its fellow, to St. John in Canada, a distance of two hundred miles. Its least breadth is half a mile, and its greatest eighteen miles. Its upper end is narrow and shallow, containing clay-discoloured water, which, however, becomes suddenly deep and clear at Crown Point, where the banks recede from each other some four or five miles. Thence, northwards, its depth is considerable, and its average width is from ten to twelve miles.

While the mountains hemming in Lake George rise, as we have seen, abruptly from its waters and are entirely free from those terraced deposits of drift soils which have so frequently challenged our attention, the flanks of Champlain are of an entirely different character. These consist of level terraces of clay and alluvium, which extend for many miles back from the margin of the lake and are covered with cropping of various kinds. Their widely receding flats have already become partially lost to sight in the haze of distance before there rise from them, on the east, the Green Mountain range, here displaying its loftiest summits, and on the west, the high and tumbled masses of the Adirondacks, the beauties of both range and wilderness being half hidden, half

enhanced by the gauzy veils of azure which they

wear.

The Champlain of to-day is, quite evidently, only a meagre remnant of a sheet of water, formerly vast as an inland sea, and indeed, there is evidence to show that it was once an arm of the Atlantic itself. Marine shells are found abundantly in its clays, which have also yielded the remains of whales, sufficiently proving that at some former time, the whole valley of the St. Lawrence, together with the Champlain basin, was an inland extension of the ocean; an American Mediterranean. Lake George, standing three hundred and fifty feet above the level of this estuary, was never overflowed, and hence the absence from it of any such deposits as the Champlain clays, and the difference in the appearance of the two sheets of water.

It is time to ask, more particularly than we have yet done, what was the origin of those terraces of alluvium of which, sometimes one, sometimes many successively, rise upon the flanks of almost every lake or stream in northern North America ? But the answer to this question is too long to be included in an already overlong chapter, while the problem itself can best be discussed in presence of the splendid illustrations furnished by Canada to the wonderful story of the "Great Ice Age," of which the phenomena of the "Champlain period" formed the closing incidents.

CHAPTER XX.

CANADA, PRESENT AND PAST.

MONTREAL is reached from Lake Champlain after a tame railway ride across the old estuarine flats of the St. Lawrence; the one and only sensation of this short trip consisting in the traveller's first view of the grand river and of the long tubular bridge which spans it. The Canadian cities will not detain us long, for we are flying homewards now, and it is only from the decks of the river- and ocean-steamers which will carry us, the one from Montreal to Quebec, the other from Quebec down the St. Lawrence into the Atlantic, shall we have an opportunity of studying a feature or two of Canada present and past. But, even so, there is something to be seen and said of the strange physical events which prepared alike this country and New England for man's use and occupation.

Montreal is almost as full of churches as a continental town, almost as catholic in its faith, and almost as unEnglish in its language. The traveller is roused from

sleep by the clang of church-bells and, once in the street, finds them full of French faces and re-echoing the French tongue. The general appearance of the city is neither American, French, nor English, but a curious mixture of all three. The more important business quarter contains warehouses and offices like those of New York or Chicago, but the wharves and quays of the St. Lawrence are faced by houses such as might border the Seine, while markets, which are entirely French in their character, cling, as they do on the Continent, to the walls of churches and public buildings. The residential streets and suburbs, on the other hand, are thoroughly English in style, their detached dwellings, trim lawns, bedded gardens, and neat fences recalling memories of home to every British tourist. The numerous churches, although not without some architectural pretensions, are none of them beautiful; their stained glass is poor, and their altar-shrines tinsel. Nevertheless there is everywhere evidence that the Catholic Church is rich and powerful in Montreal, and that the French-Canadians of the city are her good and liberal

sons.

Notre Dame, the cathedral, has a fine tower, whence a capital view of the city offers itself to all who have wind and limb for the ascent. I knew that I was no longer in the States when, with my foot upon the first step, I heard, “Il faudra payer ici, s'il vous plaît. monsieur." And the words stuck by me when, from the