Ticonderoga has since fallen into utter decay, but parts of the ruins are now preserved as a national memorial. A portion of wall and a dilapidated gable enclosing a window still stand, and make a picturesque ruin on top of a high slope rising from Lake Champlain, with a background of timbered hills. These forests to the west and south have grown during the nineteenth century, and are full of the remains of the old redoubts and entrenchments. Well-defined dry ditches are traced beyond the ramparts, with the barrack walls surrounding the parade-ground, an old well, and also the sally-port on the water side where Allen and his bold Green Mountain boys effected their entrance. During many years after the fort fell into ruins, the neighbors carried off its well-cut brick and stone work to build the growing villages on Lake Champlain's shores. All the surroundings are now eminently peaceful. The invaders, no longer warlike, are on pleasure bent; the inhabitants make paper and textiles, saw lumber, and also manufacture good lead-pencils from graphite found nearby. Sheep contentedly browse amid the relics of the great fortress, and vividly recall Browning's pastoral: "Where the quiet-colored end of evening smiles Miles and miles On the solitary pasture where our sheep, Half-asleep, Tinkle homeward through the twilight, stray or stop As they crop-- Was the site of a city, great and gay, (So they say.)" LAKE CHAMPLAIN.