Meanwhile, Montcalm and Vaudreuil were greatly perplexed and all unconscious of the new designs and movements of the enemy. The position at the Point of Orleans still seemed to be strongly occupied, for every day Colonel Carleton paraded his men up and down in full view of the camp at Beauport; the batteries at Point Lévi thundered with their accustomed vehemence, and Admiral Saunders's division still lay threateningly in the basin below the city. Thus the weakening of these camps by twelve hundred men, who marched up the south shore to join Wolfe, was not perceived by Montcalm. Above Quebec, Bourlamaque was not less perplexed by the mysterious movements of Holmes's squadron and the army transports. Up and down the river they sailed, now threatening to land at Pointe-aux-Trembles, now at Sillery, and greatly confusing the right wing of the French army by their complex movements. At last the great night came, starlit and serene. The camp-fires of two armies spotted the shores of the wide river, and the ships lay like wild-fowl in coveys above the town. At Beauport, an untiring General of France, who, booted and spurred, through a hundred days had snatched but a broken sleep, in the ebb of a losing game, now longed for his adored Candiac, grieved for a beloved daughter's death, sent cheerful messages to his aged mother and to his wife, and by the deeper protests of his love, foreshadowed his own doom. At Cap Rouge, a dying soldier of England, unperturbed and valiant, reached out a finger to trace the last movement in the desperate campaign of a life that had opened in Flanders at the age of sixteen, now closing as he took from his bosom the portrait of his affianced wife, and said to his old schoolfellow, "Give this to her, Jervis, for we shall meet no more." Then, passing from the deck, silent and steady, no signs of pain upon his face--so had the calm come to him as to nature, and to this beleaguered city, before the whirlwind--he viewed the clustered groups of boats filled with the flower of his army, settled down into a menacing tranquillity. There lay the Light Infantry, Bragg's, Kennedy's, Lascelles', Anstruther's Regiments, Fraser's Highlanders, and the much-loved, much-blamed Louisbourg Grenadiers. Steady, indomitable, silent as cats, precise as mathematicians, he could trust them, as they loved his awkward, pain-twisted body and ugly red hair. "Damme, Jack, didst ever take hell in tow before?" said a sailor to his comrades as the marines, some days before, had grappled with a second flotilla of French fire-ships. "Nay, but I've been in tow of Jimmy Wolfe's red head; that's hell-fire, lad!" was the reply. [Illustration: CAPTAIN JAMES COOK (Piloted Wolfe's Army up the Harbour of Quebec)]