"My certes, they made a brave picture, with the sun shining on the colours of their kilts and the cool Canadian breeze waving them as in a rhythm of martial motion. Ah! the heart aye warms to the tartan, and I could have given my soul, if it be left me, which I must hope, to stand in front of that red and green line, an officer of the Fraser's, as I have now become, by virtue of the successful completion of my contract. They awaited orders with impatience, for the headlong charge has ever been the natural form of battle with Highlanders, only the appearance of General Wolfe, fearlessly wearing a new, conspicuous uniform, and the entire confidence of his step forward and backward while history boiled in the pot, held them in like a rein. "It was the French who joined battle first, making some confusion among themselves as they did so, because their several units fired differently. This wasted and scattered their salvoes, but they advanced gallantly to within forty yards of the British lines. Then General Wolfe ordered 'Fire!' and before its solid stroke the French reeled like trees stricken by lightning. Swiftly, then, the Highlanders leapt forward with bayonets gleaming, and in what I say of them--my own people--I say of the British army as a whole: it caught the French before they could reform, and thus the issue was already decided. "Now here was a change on the message, my Comte Frontenac, in earlier years, returned to a British admiral who demanded his surrender. 'The only answer,' he swore, 'I will give will be from the mouth of my cannon and musketry, that he may learn that it is not in such a style that a man of my rank may be summoned.' It was a change, too, from the ill-success of General Wolfe's assault on Montmorency, over beside the little river falling into the big one, where the very elements were unfavourable. "Montcalm won then, very fairly won, for his fire upon the British was of a nature which none could overcome. Monsieur Vaudreuil, the Governor, who, like the Intendant Bigot, had an eternal desire to reap where he had not sown, was so patronizing as to say after the Montmorency fight, 'I have no more anxiety about Quebec. Monsieur Wolfe, I am sure, will make no progress.' 'La, la,' as Madame Angelique would say when she teases me, what a poor prophet was his excellency Vaudreuil, but, indeed, prophecy has a trick of falling into incapable hands and I, being, I trust, capable, have rarely tried it.