Where Montgomery and his officers held their mess in the winter of 1775. COPYRIGHT.] Little or nothing is known of what happened in Montreal during the autumn of 1775, when the Army of Congress held possession of the town. There may, and doubtless were, some sympathizers in the city who frequented the Chateau Fortier, but the loyalists avoided its vicinity as much as policy permitted. The French and English ladies looked askance at the American soldiers, and if a town, invested by an enemy, indulged in any form of merriment, it is probable that no invitation was ever addressed to General Montgomery or Brigadier-General Wooster. In their rounds of the town it may have been that glimpses of home gatherings in the firelight may have given to these men of war many a twinge of homesickness for hearths across the border, where women who had been clad in satin and brocade sat spinning homespun, and were content to drink spring water from the hills, while the tea they had loved to sip in their Colonial drawing-rooms was floating about the Boston beaches. If the Boys in blue and buff encountered any of the Montreal maidens in their walks by the river, or glanced at them as they passed through the gates to wander in the maple woods around, the English girls passed them haughtily with a cold disdain in their blue eyes, and the French demoiselles flashed a fine scorn from the depths of their dark orbs, which wounded as keenly as a thrust of steel. Events followed each other so rapidly across the line that Montgomery, tired of inaction, resolved to carry out before the year ended his cherished plan of making an assault on Quebec, and proceeded to join Arnold's men, who, half-famished and in rags, had arrived outside that city's walls. Arnold, who was born at Norwich, Connecticut, Jan. 14, 1741, was, it is said, a very handsome man, but his character was a striking combination of contradictory qualities, and his career marked by extremes. He was the bearer of a letter from General Washington to the Canadians, in which was written: "We have taken up arms in defence of our liberty, our property, our wives and our children. The Grand American Congress has sent an army into your province, not to plunder but to protect you. To co-operate with this design I have detached Col. Arnold into your country, with a part of the Army under my command. Come then, ye generous citizens, range yourselves under the standard of general liberty, against which all the force of artifice and tyranny will never be able to prevail."