On the southern shore of the St. Lawrence, in the deepest recess of a small curving bay, the afternoon sun fell through a screen of bulrushes upon a birch canoe and a naked man seated in the shallows beside it. In one hand he held out, level with his head, a lock of hair, dark and long and matted, while the other sheared at it with a razor. The razor flashed as he turned it this way and that against the sun. On his shoulders and raised upper arm a few water-drops glistened, for he had been swimming. The severed locks fell into the stream that rippled beside him through the bulrush stems. Some found a channel at once and were swept out of sight, others were caught against the stems and trailed out upon the current like queer water-flags. He laid the razor back in the canoe and, rising cautiously, looked about for a patch of clear, untroubled water to serve him for a mirror; but small eddies and cross-currents dimpled the surface everywhere, and his search was not a success. Next he fetched forth from the canoe an earthenware pan with lye and charcoal, mixed a paste, and began to lather his head briskly. Twice he paused in his lathering. Before his shelter rolled the great river, almost two miles broad; and clear across that distance, from Montreal, came the sound of drums beating, bells ringing, men shouting and cheering. In the Place d'Armes, over yonder, Amherst was parading his troops to receive the formal surrender of the Marquis de Vaudreuil. Murray and Haviland were there, leading their brigades, with Gage and Fraser and Burton; Carleton and Haldfmand and Howe--Howe of the Heights of Abraham, brother of him who fell in the woods under Ticonderoga; the great Johnson of the Mohawk Valley, whom the Iroquois obeyed; Rogers of the backwoods and his brothers, bravest of the brave; Schuyler and Lyman: and over against them, drinking the bitterest cup of their lives, Levis and Bourlamaque and Bougainville, Dumas, Pouchot, and de la Corne--victors and vanquished, all the surviving heroes of the five years' struggle face to face in the city square.