During the night of 31st May, the Fenian bands left Buffalo city, travelling by different outlets; but meeting on Niagara Street and Black Rock Road, they halted at Black Rock Ferry about five miles below, and north of Buffalo city; there they embarked in scows, which, with a steam tug, lay in readiness to receive and tow them over to the Canada shore, distance about one thousand yards. They landed at the wharf called Lower Ferry, and marched westward towards the village of Waterloo. This is a place containing about seven hundred and fifty inhabitants. By persons living at a distance it is called Fort Erie from an old fort of historical name situated two miles south-west on the shore of Lake Erie, and nearly opposite to Buffalo city, where the outflowing volume of Niagara is three miles wide. But to the inhabitants of the surrounding country the village is only known by name of “The Ferry.” The river at this point has contracted to a width of eight hundred yards, and the traffic across is conveyed by a steamer which plies every half hour. On the American side there is first an embankment separating Buffalo mill race from the main river. On this embankment are several flour mills, lofty and wide, the most southerly of the group now marked with Fenian bullets which, on the afternoon of June 2nd, were directed against the steam tug Robb, a vessel from Dunnville, which gallantly stemmed the current with about sixty Fenian prisoners on board, below decks, on passage to Port Colborne, twenty miles westward. The mill race is spanned by a swing bridge, after which is the Erie and New York canal, which extends along the foot of the Buffalo and Black Rock heights, which there rise seventy or eighty feet. On the Canada shore is a corresponding range of heights, but more rounded and covered with verdure, and with a level margin between them and Niagara river, the level varying from three hundred to fifty yards wide. On this plain lies scattered on three quarters of a mile of river front the village of Waterloo. It has three small churches, a school house, which was, for a short while on June 2nd, a prison for Fenians, before these were taken on board the steamer Robb; and some hotels, stores, and a few goodly dwelling houses embowered in orchards, in maple and poplar groves, one of which, occupying a prominent position, became the prison of certain officers and men of the Welland Artillery, who, with a portion of the Dunnville Naval Brigade, had become captives to the Fenians, after placing Fenian prisoners on board their vessel. This, as will hereafter appear, was not the result of their own mistakes, but of a turn in the fortunes of war, which with many other adverse complexities characterized the different parts of the military drama of the 2nd of June.