Several hours had passed away in the interesting discussion of their war plans, and the council was nearly concluded, when suddenly the attention both of the officers and chiefs was arrested by the report of a single cannon. From the direction of the sound, it was evident that the shot had been fired from the battery placed on the southern or lakeward extremity of the island of Bois Blanc, and as the circumstance was unusual enough to indicate the existence of some approaching cause for excitement, several of the younger of both, who, from their youth, had been prevented from taking any active share in the deliberations of the day, stole, successively and unobservedly, through the large folding-doors of the building, which, owing to the great heat of the weather, had been left open. After traversing about fifty yards of sward, intersecting the high road, which, running parallel with the river, separated the council-hall from the elevated bank, the officers found, collected in groups on the extreme verge of this latter, and anxiously watching certain movements in the battery opposite to them, most of the troops and inferior Indians they had left loitering there at the commencement of the council. These movements were hasty, and as of men preparing to repeat the shot, the report of which had reached them from the opposite extremity of the island. Presently the forms, hitherto intermingled, became separate and stationary--an arm of one was next extended--then was seen to rise a flash of light, and then a volume of dense smoke, amid which the loud report found its sullen way, bellowing like thunder through some blackening cloud, while, from the peculiar nature of the sound, it was recognised, by the experienced in those matters, to have proceeded from a shotted gun. The war of 1812 had its beginning in the manner thus described. They were the first shots fired in that struggle, and although at an object little calculated to inspire much alarm, still, as the first indications of an active hostility, they were proportionably exciting to those whose lot it was thus to "break ground," for operations on a larger scale.