In 1814 a varied war business was transacted between the United States and Great Britain. In July—that month for excursions to Niagara Falls—Generals Scott and Ripley crossed the hurrying river near the cataract, and took Fort Erie, which, fortunately for the hackmen, they left like a toll-gate, to entice yearly from travellers its original cost. As if to increase the wonders of this taking neighborhood, two days after the capture of Fort Erie, the battle of Chippewa was fought, in which bayonets were actually crossed,—a rare checker-work, although often talked of in those select romances, the despatches of raw militia generals, who, in their first sight of glancing steel and first smell of villainous saltpetre, see many things crosswise and crooked. Fifteen days later, Winfield Scott made a ghostly spectacle, at Lundy’s Lane, of great numbers of well-seasoned British Regulars. Fortunate Niagara! in owning so many wonders, “The moving accidents of flood and field.” Human phosphates are here most advantageously diluted with large parts of uncounted water. Meanwhile, the veteran English squadrons which had served under Wellington, in Spain and Portugal, glorified by victories over Ney, Massena, Marmont, Soult, and Joseph Bonaparte,—their bullet-slitted flags inscribed “Torres Vedras,” “Talavera,” “Ciudad Rodrigo,” “Almeida,” “Salamanca,” “Madrid,” and “Vittoria,”—mustering fourteen thousand men, and led by Sir George Prevost, pushed down from Canada upon Plattsburg, where General Macomb had assembled fifteen hundred men. Crossing the little river Saranac, on one side of which Plattsburg stood, in modest, village quiet, Macomb posted his men. Like cedar posts, these unseasoned troops stood rooted to the soil, stubbornly refusing to bend before the furious storm of grape and canister which swept through them for four days. While this heroic endurance was maintained on the land side, in front of the village and on the vitreous surface of Lake Champlain, Commandant Thomas Macdonough, on the morning of September 11, with a squadron of fourteen small vessels, carrying 86 guns and 850 officers and men, anchoring in the bay and awaiting the approach of a British fleet of sixteen ships, with 95 guns and 1,000 men, so charged the common trading waters of the lake with soul-lifting influences, that even commerce seems to bear there its pennons more stiffly ever since, and ordinary smacks to kiss the wind with a lover’s trancing relish.