Algonquins feigned to give themselves up for lost, and, setting up the death-song of the Adirondacks, appeared to await their inevitable fate. The Frenchmen, throwing themselves flat in the batteaux, and resting the muzzles of their carbines upon the gunnels, coolly calculated the effects of the coming discharge; but Pisquaret and his warriors raised their voices in chanting the victories of their tribe, inflaming the Iroquois by vaunts of injuries which they had done them, and defying them in return not to spare any torture in seeing how the Algonquins could die. The exasperated foe was just pealing the war-cry, when the deadly blaze of the carbines changed their exultation in a moment to howls of agony and dismay. But these were tricks which could not be repeated; and, long after, the empire of the Grande Monarque paid dearly for these frolics in the unpruned wilderness. Those who are fond of tracing the greatest political events and changes to accidents inconsiderable in themselves, have maintained that the first volley of fire-arms that startled the echoes of Lake Champlain, decided the fate and fixed the limits of French dominion in America. Nor is this theory to be lightly dismissed as fanciful; for it cannot be doubted that the subsequent spread of the Anglo-Saxon race over the hunting-grounds of the Mohawks, and through them to the further west, was owing to the favourable treaties which the English were able to effect with the Iroquois in the days of their power,—treaties which, had they been secured by the French, would have opened the whole region now called New York to their countrymen, and filled it with a mongrel population under the absolute control of Jesuits and political adventurers. Nor can any thing be ascertained more decisive of what was at first a game and a problem, than the collisions I have described. The Iroquois soon found out the secret of their discomfiture, and associated the name of a Frenchman with that of the Algonquins in their inveterate hatred. And when they in turn found Pale-faces to seek their alliance, and supply them with arms, they became the barrier of British enterprise against the encroachments of France; and so it was that the beautiful vale of Mohawk, the shores of Erie and Ontario, and the rugged mountains of Vermont, came to be filled with the sons of Englishmen, and not with the dwarfish overgrowth of the French Canadian provinces. The laws, civil institutions, and the religion of England thus found a footing in that great territory, which, as more or less influencing all the other members of the American confederacy, is called the empire state:—and perhaps the bells that ring for the English service throughout that region would have been tolling for the Latin mass, but for those early encounters on the shores of Lake Champlain.