They marched merrily along to the music of their voyageur songs, and as they perceived our uniform as we came up, they set up the Indian War-whoop, followed by a shout of _Vive le Roi_ along the whole line. Such a body of men in such a temper, and with so perfect a use of their arms as all of them possessed, if posted on such ground as would preclude the possibility of regular troops out-manoeuvering them, (and such positions are not hard to find in Canada,) must have been rather a formidable body to have attacked. Finding that the enemy were between us and our regiment, proceeding to join would have been out of the question. The Colonel therefore requested that we might be attached to the militia on the advance. The Commander-in-Chief finding that the old gentleman had a perfect knowledge of the French language, (not by any means so common an accomplishment in the army in those days as it is now,) gave him command of a large brigade of militia, and, like other men who rise to greatness, his friends and followers shared his good fortune, for a subaltern of our regiment who had come out in another ship and joined us at Montreal, was appointed as his Brigade Major; and I was exalted to the dignity of Principal Medical Officer to his command, and we proceeded to Lachine, the head-quarters of the advance, and where it had been determined to make the stand, in order to cover Montreal, the great commercial emporium of the Canadas, and which, moreover, was the avowed object of the American attack. Our force here presented rather a motley appearance; besides a small number of the line consisting chiefly of detachments, there was a considerable body of sailors and marines; the former made tolerable Artillery men, and the latter had, I would say, even a more serviceable appearance than an equal body of the line, average it throughout the army. The fact is that during the war the marines had the best recruits that entered the army. The reason of this, as explained to me by an intelligent non-commissioned officer of that corps, was, that whereas a soldier of the line, returning on furlough to his native village, had barely enough of money to pay his travelling expenses, and support him while there, and even that with a strict attention to economy, the marine, on the other hand, on returning from a three years' cruise, had all the surplus pay and prize money of that period placed in his hands before he started, and this, with his pay going on at the same rate as that of the soldier of the line, enabled him to expend in a much more gentlemanly style of profusion than the other.