Houses, churches, and monasteries crashed and crumbled beneath the pitiless discharge. The great cathedral, where the memories and the trophies of a century's defiance of the accursed heretic had so thickly gathered, was gradually reduced to a skeleton of charred walls. The church of Notre Dame de la Victoire, erected in gratitude for the delivery of the city from the last and only previous attack upon it sixty years before, was one of the first buildings to suffer from the far more serious punishment of this one. Wolfe, though already suffering from more than his chronic ill-health, was ubiquitous and indefatigable; now behind Monckton's guns at Point Lévis, now with Townshend's batteries at Montmorency, now up the river, ranging with his glass those miles of forbidding cliffs which he may already have begun to think he should one day have to climb. Some of Saunders' ships were in the Basin, between Orleans and Quebec, and frequently engaged with Montcalm's floating batteries; while in the mean time the roar of artillery from a dozen different quarters filled the simmering July days, and lit the short summer nights with fiery shapes, and drew in fitful floods the roving thunder-clouds that at this season of the year in North America are apt to lurk behind the serenest sky. Fighting at close quarters there was, too, in plenty, though of an outpost and backwoods kind. Bois Herbert, with his painted Canadians and Abernakis Indians, and Stark and young Rogers with their colonial rangers--Greek against Greek--scalped each other with a hereditary ferocity that English and French regulars knew nothing of. In bringing a fleet up to Quebec, British sailors had already performed one feat pronounced impossible by Canadian tradition. They now still further upset their enemies' calculations by running the gauntlet of the batteries of Quebec and placing the Sutherland, with several smaller ships, at some distance up the river. This cost Montcalm six hundred men, whom he had to send under Dumas to watch the squadron. But all this brought the end no nearer. Time was exceeding precious, and July was almost out. Necessary messages were continually passing under flags of truce, and superfluous notes of defiance sometimes accompanied them. "You may destroy the town," said De Ramezay to Wolfe, "but you will never get inside it." "I will take Quebec," replied the fiery stripling, "if I stay here till November."