Norton was lodged in a French house on the east side of the lake, at what is now called Chimney Point; and one day his guardian, De Muy, either thinking to impress him with the strength of the place, or with an amusing confidence in the minister’s incapacity for making inconvenient military observations, invited him to visit the fort. He accepted the invitation, crossed over with the courteous officer, and reports the ramparts to have been twenty feet thick, about twenty feet high, and mounted with above twenty cannon. The octagonal tower which overlooked the ramparts, and answered in some sort to the donjon of a 255 feudal castle, was a bomb-proof structure in vaulted masonry, of the slaty black limestone of the neighborhood, three stories in height, and armed with nine or ten cannon, besides a great number of patereroes,--a kind of pivot-gun much like a swivel.[266] In due time the prisoners reached Montreal, whence they were sent to Quebec; and in the course of the next year those who remained alive were exchanged and returned to New England.[267] Mrs. Smead and her infant daughter “Captivity” died in Canada, and, by a singular fatality, her husband had scarcely returned home when he was waylaid and killed by Indians. Fort Massachusetts was soon rebuilt by the province, and held its own thenceforth till the war was over. Sergeant Hawks became a lieutenant-colonel, and took a creditable part in the last French war. For two years after the incursion of Rigaud the New England borders were scourged with partisan warfare, bloody, monotonous, and futile, with no event that needs recording, and no result beyond a momentary check to the progress of settlement. At length, in July, 1748, news came that the chief contending powers in Europe had come to terms of 256 agreement, and in the next October the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle was signed. Both nations were tired of the weary and barren conflict, with its enormous cost and its vast entail of debt. It was agreed that conquests should be mutually restored. The chief conquest of England was Louisbourg, with the island of Cape Breton,--won for her by the farmers and fishermen of New England. When the preliminaries of peace were under discussion, Louis XV. had demanded the restitution of the lost fortress; and George II. is said to have replied that it was not his to give, having been captured by the people of Boston.[268] But his sense of justice was forced to yield to diplomatic necessity, for Louisbourg was the indispensable price of peace. To the indignation of the northern provinces, it was restored to its former owners. “The British ministers,” says Smollett, “gave up the important island of Cape Breton in exchange for a petty factory in the East Indies” (Madras), and the King deigned to send two English noblemen to the French court as security for the bargain.