"Regardless of the festive decorations and the bright faces around them, the 'Guard' passed through the assembly as if they were not. On through salon and passage--past ball-room and conversation parlor--they glided with measured step, and halting in front of the 'Montgomery Trophy,' paid military honours to the memento of a hero's valiant, if unsuccessful act. Upon their taking close order, the Bombardier, who personated the dead Sergeant, and who actually wore the blood-stained sword-belt of a man who was killed in the action commemorated, advanced and delivered an address to the Commander of the Quebec Garrison, of which the concluding words were:-- 'We ask of you to pay us now one tribute, By firing from these heights one last salute.' "The grave, sonorous words of the martial request were hardly uttered, ere through the darkness of the night the great cannon boomed,--a soldier's welcome and a brave man's requiem,--which caused women's hearts to throb and men's to beat exultingly." While the whole air trembled with the sullen reverberations, which echoed from crag to crag, the glare of rockets lit up the path of Pres-de-Ville, as the signal lights had done one hundred winters before. At the suggestion of the American Consul, the old house on St. Louis street, in which the body of Montgomery was laid out January 1st, 1776, was decorated with the American flag, and brilliantly illuminated, in honour of him who had so nobly tried to do what he considered his duty. And thus the years of the century, as they rolled around, have in a great measure smoothed away the animosities which marked those days that tried men's souls, when the sons of those who had played around the same old English hearths fought to the death for liberty or loyalty. That the angry strifes are forgotten, leaving only the memory of the bravery which distinguished the star actors in the great drama, needs no further proof than can be found on a green hill near the Palisades, in the State of New York, where one hundred and twenty years ago a warm young heart, beating beneath the soldier's red coat, was stilled by American justice. The granite shaft on the spot tells its sad and sombre story:-- Here died, October 2nd, 1780, Major John Andre, of the British Army, who, entering the American lines on a Secret Mission to Benedict Arnold for the Surrender of West Point, was taken prisoner, tried and condemned as a spy. His death, though according to the stern code of war, moved even his enemies to pity, and both armies mourned the fate of one so young and so brave. In 1821 his remains were removed to Westminster Abbey.