At Crown Point the lake greatly improves. The water appears much clearer, and the width of the lake is nearly if not quite fourfolded. It continues to expand till it becomes ten or twelve miles in breadth, and islands begin to be numerous. To the northward the higher peaks of the Green Mountains stretch away with magnificent outlines; and on the west, a bleak and craggy range of hills, which are said to harbour even yet the wolf and the bear, approach, and then recede from the shore. Here, as early as 1731, the French built Fort Frederick, as the first move towards the seizure and claim of the whole surrounding territory; and from this point they made their bloody and atrocious incursions into New England, and towards the Mohawk, or dismissed their hireling savages to do it for them. The recesses of Fort Frederick are believed to have rivalled the dungeons of the Inquisition in scenes of misery and crime. In its gloomy cells were plotted the inhuman massacres which drenched the American settlements in blood. There, it is said, the Indian butchers received their commissions to burn, tomahawk, and scalp; and there, in the presence of Jesuit fathers, or at least with their connivance, was the gleaming gold counted down to the savages in return for their infernal trophies of success; the silvery locks of the aged colonist, the clotted tresses of women, and the crimsoned ringlets of the child. In 1759 this detestable hold of grasping and remorseless tyranny was blown up, and abandoned by the French to General Amherst. Soon after, the British Government began to erect a fortification in the vicinity of the ruins, and a noble work it was; though it proved of no use at all, after the enormous sum of two millions sterling had been expended on its walls of granite, and ditches blasted in the solid rock. The exploits of Arnold and Sir Guy Carleton in this vicinity have been already described. Since the close of the war of the Revolution, the costly works at Crown Point have been suffered to fall into decay; and they are now piles of ruin, covered with weeds, among which the red berries of the sumach are conspicuously beautiful in their time.