* Marie de l’Incarnation, Lettre du 16 Oct., 1666. ** Grandet, Notice manuscrite sur Dollier de Casson, extract given by J. Vigor in appendix to Histoire du Montréal (Montreal, 1868). light-hearted; and, when a servant of the Jesuits fell into the water, he threw off his cassock and leaped after him. His strength gave out, and the man was drowned; but a grateful Jesuit led him aside and requited his efforts with a morsel of bread. * A wood of chestnut-trees full of nuts at length stayed the hunger of the famished troops. It was Saint Theresa’s day when they approached the lower Mohawk town. A storm of wind and rain set in; but, anxious to surprise the enemy, they pushed on all night amid the moan and roar of the forest; over slippery logs, tangled roots, and oozy mosses; under dripping boughs and through saturated bushes. This time there was no want of good guides; and when in the morning they issued from the forest, they saw, amid its cornfields, the palisades of the Indian stronghold. They had two small pieces of cannon brought from the lake by relays of men, but they did not stop to use them. Their twenty drums beat the charge, and they advanced to seize the place by _coup-de-main_. Lucidly for them, a panic had seized the Indians. Not that they were taken by surprise, for they had discovered the approaching French, and, two days before, had sent away their women and children in preparation for a desperate fight; but the din of the drums, which they took for so many devils in the French service; and the armed men advancing from the rocks and thickets in files that seemed interminable,--so wrought on the scared imagination of the warriors that they fled in terror to their next * Dollier de Casson, Histoire du Montréal, a.d 1665, 1666. town, a short distance above. Tracy lost no time, but hastened in pursuit. A few Mohawks were seen on the hills, yelling and firing too far for effect. Repentigny, at the risk of his scalp, climbed a neighboring height, and looked down on the little army, which seemed so numerous as it passed beneath, “that,” writes the superior of the Ursulines, “he told me that he thought the good angels must have joined with it; whereat he stood amazed.”