The three lake schooners, each fitted with a gun and intended to carry troops to the island when the long deferred attack should be made, were still inactive. A loyalist reconnoitering party was sent out to report upon what proved to be the _Caroline’s_ last trip. She had landed a cannon and several armed men, and had dropped her anchor east of the island. Expecting to find her still there it was decided to “cut her out” that night. The process technically known as cutting out is a naval one, conducted with great secrecy and muffled oars, men and cutlasses, pistols and boarding pikes, black night and plenty of blood, after the manner of Marryat; always a dangerous business, but in these circumstances, where their chart reported irresistible currents and not half a mile above the Falls, a most perilous enterprise. Luckily there was the right kind of material at hand and to spare for it. They had but a few small boats of about twelve feet in length, each pulling four oars; it would be necessary to keep uncomfortably close to the rapids in order to avoid observation from Navy Island; the difficulties, did the men once quail, were so great that the shortest way was to put them out of mind. At four o’clock that afternoon Colonel MacNab and Capt. Drew, R.N., stood on the lookout discussing the situation. They saw the _Caroline_ performing her duty of conveyance, the telescope revealing the field-pieces and men. “This won’t do,” said MacNab. “I say, Drew, do you think you can cut that vessel out!” “Oh, yes,” was the ready answer; “nothing easier. But it must be done at night.” “Well, then,” was the laconic order, “go and do it.” That order “nearly fired the continent as well as the _Caroline_.” To quote the patriot chronicle, it was now that “an insult, the most reckless, cowardly, and unwarranted that was ever offered to a sovereign people, was given.” Captain Drew was a commander on half pay, “elderly, shortish, and stout,” who had settled in Woodstock in 1834 upon a beautiful farm, where he fondly hoped to end his days in peaceful occupations of wheat-growing and tree-planting. The Duke of Northumberland, who visited him there, thought it the prettiest place he had seen in Canada; and indeed Captain Drew and Major James Barwick may be termed the pioneers of those--the Vansittarts, Lights, De Blaquières, Deedes and others--who formed the far-known aristocratic settlement of Oxford. The midlands of England held nothing lovelier than these homes scattered along the Thames, farms separated by beautiful ravines, studded and fringed with elms and noble maples, well built picturesque houses, wherein the owners entertained after the manner of their class and kind and spent much money. The stress of war in very few years was to wipe out this community of blood, manners and culture; but Captain Drew’s tenure, owing to the cutting out of the _Caroline_, was to be shorter still.