Lake Champlain lay glaring in the winter sun, a sheet of spotless snow; and the wavy ridges of the Adirondack? bordered the dazzling landscape with the cold gray of their denuded forests. The long procession of weary men crept slowly on under the lee of the shore; and when night came they bivouacked by squads among the trees, dug away the snow with their snowshoes, piled it in a bank around them, built their fire in the middle, and crouched about it on beds of spruce or hemlock; * while, as they lay close packed for mutual warmth, the winter sky arched them like a vault of burnished steel, sparkling with the cold diamond lustre of its myriads of stars. This arctic serenity of the elements was varied at times by heavy snow-storms; and, before they reached their journey’s end, the earth and the ice were buried to the unusual depth of four feet. From Lake Champlain they passed to Lake George, ** and the frigid glories of its snow-wrapped mountains; thence crossed to the Hudson, and groped their way through the woods in search of the Mohawk towns. They soon went astray; for thirty Algonquins, whom they had taken as guides, had found * One of the men, telling the story of their sufferings to Daniel Gookin, of Massachusetts, indicated this as their mode of encamping. See Mass. Hist. Coll., first series, I. 161. ** Carte des grands lacs, Ontario et autres... et des pays traversez par MM. de Tracy et Courcelle our aller attaquer les agniés (Mohawks), 1666. the means of a grand debauch at Fort Ste. Thérèse, drunk themselves into helplessness, and lingered behind. Thus Courcelle and his men mistook the path, and, marching by way of Saratoga Lake and Long Lake, * found themselves, on Saturday the twentieth of February, close to the little Dutch hamlet of Corlaer or Schenectady. Here the chief man in authority told them that most of the Mohawks and Oneidas had gone to war with another tribe. They, however, caught a few stragglers, and had a smart skirmish with a party of warriors, losing an officer and several men. Half frozen and half starved, they encamped in the neighboring woods, where, on Sunday, three envoys appeared from Albany, to demand why they had invaded the territories of his Royal Highness the Duke of York. It was now that they learned for the first time that the New Netherlands had passed into English hands, a change which boded no good to Canada. The envoys seemed to take their explanations in good part, made them a present of wine and provisions, and allowed them to buy further supplies from the Dutch of Schenectady. They even invited them to enter the village, but Courcelle declined, partly because the place could not hold them all, and partly because he feared that his men, once seated in a chimney-corner, could never be induced to leave it. Their position was cheerless enough; for the vast beds of snow around them were soaking slowly under a sullen rain, and there was danger