And it had fared almost as badly with the Canadian fleet on Lake Ontario. The boats under Sir James Yeo, the young English commander, were good only for close-range fighting, the boats under Commodore Chauncey best for long-range firing. All July and August the fleets maneuvered to catch each other off guard. Between times each raided the coast of the other for provisions, Chauncey paying a second visit to Toronto, Yeo swooping down on Sodus Bay. All September the game of hide and seek went on between the two Ontario squadrons. Sunday night, the 8th of September, in a gale, two of Chauncey's ships sank, with all hands but sixteen. Two nights later in a squally wind, by the light of the moon, two more of his slow sailers, unable to keep up with the rest of the fleet, were snapped up by the English off Niagara with one hundred captives. Again, on September 27, at eight in the evening, six miles off Toronto harbor, Chauncey came up with the English, and the two fleets poured broadsides into each other. Then Yeo's crippled brigs limped into Toronto harbor, while Chauncey sailed gayly off to block all connection with Montreal and help to convoy troops {367} from Niagara down the St. Lawrence for the master stroke of the year. The way was now clear for the twofold aim of the American staff,--to starve out Ontario and concentrate all strength in a signal attack on Montreal. The autumn campaign was without doubt marked by the most comical and heroic episodes of the war. Wilkinson was to go down the St. Lawrence from Lake Ontario with eight thousand men to join General Hampton coming by the way of Lake Champlain with another five thousand men in united attack against Montreal. November 5 Wilkinson's troops descended in three hundred flat-boats through the Thousand Islands, now bleak and leafless and somber in the gray autumn light. It seemed hardly possible that the few Canadian troops cooped up in Kingston would dare to pursue such a strong American force, but history is made up of impossibles. Feeling perfectly secure, Wilkinson's troops scattered on the river. By November 10, at nine in the morning, half the Americans had run down the rapids of the Long Sault, and were in the region of Cornwall, pressing forward to unite with Hampton, where Chateauguay River came into Lake St. Louis, just above Montreal. The other half of Wilkinson's army was above the Long Sault, near Chrysler's Farm. From the outset the rear guard of the advancing invaders had been harried by Canadian sharpshooters. November 11, about midday, it was learned that a Canadian battalion of eight hundred was pressing eagerly on the rear. Chance shots became a rattling fusillade. Quick as flash the Americans land and wheel face about to fight, posted behind a stone wall and along a dried gully with sheltering cliffs at Chrysler's Farm. By 2.30 the foes are shooting at almost hand-to-hand range. Then, through the powder smoke, the