red coat as English flag when a Swiss guard hacked him to pieces. The boats not yet ashore were sunk by the blaze of cannon. A few escaped back in the darkness, but by daylight over one hundred English had been captured. Cannon, mortars, and musketoons were mounted to command the fort inside the walls, and a continuous rain of fire began from the hills. In vain Duchambon, the French commander, waited for reënforcements from Canada. Convent, hospital, barracks, all the houses of the town, were peppered by bombs till there was not a roof intact in the place. The soldiers, of whom there were barely two thousand, were ready to mutiny. The citizens besought Duchambon to surrender. Provisions ran out. Looking down from the tops of the walls, cracking jokes with the English across the ditch, the French soldiers counted more than a thousand scaling ladders ready for hand-to-hand assault, and a host of barrels filled with mud behind which the English sharpshooters crouched. It had just been arranged between Warren and Pepperrell that the {220} former should attack by sea while the latter assaulted by land, when on June 16 the French capitulated. How the New England enthusiasts ran rampant through the abandoned French fort need not be told. How Parson Moody, famous for his long prayers, hewed down images in the Catholic chapel till he was breathless and then came to the officers' state dinner so exhausted that when asked to pronounce blessing he could only mutter, "Good Lord, we have so much to thank Thee for, time is too short; we must leave it to eternity. Amen"; how the New Englanders, unused to French wines, drank themselves torpid on the stores of the fort cellar; how the French the next year made superhuman effort to regain Louisburg, only to have a magnificent fleet of one hundred and fifty sail wrecked on Sable Island, Duke d'Anville, the commander, dying of heartbreak on his ship anchored near Halifax, his successor killing himself with his own sword,--cannot be told here. Louisburg was the prize of the war, and England threw the prize away by giving it back to France in the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748. The English government paid back the colonies for their outlay, but of all the rich French pirate ships loaded with booty, captured at Louisburg by leaving the French flag flying, not a penny's worth went to the provincial troops. Warren's seamen received all the loot. [Illustration: RUINS OF THE FORTIFICATIONS AT LOUISBURG] Like all preceding treaties, the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle left unsettled the boundaries between New France and New England. In Acadia, in New York, on the Ohio, collisions were bound to come.