We return once more to the Adirondacks--to Lake Champlain--to the Northern Gateway of the Nation as it was found in the war of 1812. Let the reader travel the whole nation over--travel from Eastport to San Diego and from Whatcom to Key West, he cannot find a region that stirs the blood of the patriot more than does the Adirondacks. Three times since the Americans first fought for liberty came the hosts of the enemy with the north wind into the narrow gulch where lies Lake Champlain--they came in whelming drifts to the Split Rock, to Saratoga, and to Plattsburg. And then, like the snow on the sunny southern slopes in May, they melted away. Remarkable--even astounding, as it seems to the tourist of these days--was the ending of two of these invasions. For though Champlain is but a narrow water, and in those days the region round about was in great part an unexplored wilderness, both invasions ended in naval battles between squadrons, and in the later one there was a ship that rated with the _Constellation_ and the _Macedonian_--a frigate fit to sail on any sea. [Illustration: Near Skenesborough on Lake Champlain. _From an old engraving in the collection of Mr. W. C. Crane._] How the British under Carleton saw “the face of the enemy” near the Split Rock, and Carleton abandoned forever his hope of glory, has already been told, and it now remains to recall to the memory of the reader how Macdonough met the British forces behind Cumberland Head and, in spite of their superior force, destroyed their power. Of great moment and far-reaching were the campaigns planned by the British against the young American republic in the summer of 1814. Napoleon had fallen. On March 31st the Duke of Wellington had marched into Paris, and on May 11th Napoleon abdicated the throne of France and was sent away to the island of Elba in the Mediterranean. The hosts of veterans that had accomplished the defeat of the French emperor could then be carried across the Western Ocean to fight the Yankees. What the character of the veterans who were thus sent to the United States was, has been accurately and in detail told both by the Duke of Wellington himself and by Napier. Says the Duke, who commanded but failed to restrain them, regarding their deeds in a friendly country: “It is impossible to describe to you the irregularities and outrages committed by the troops. There is not an outrage of any description that has not been committed on a people who have uniformly received them as friends.” And Napier describes as follows the sacking of Badajos by these veterans: “All the dreadful passions of human nature were displayed. Shameless rapacity, brutal intemperance, savage lust, cruelty and murder, shrieks and piteous lamentations, groans, shouts, imprecations, the hissing of fires bursting from the houses, the crashing of doors and windows, and reports of muskets used in violence resounded for two days and nights in the streets of Badajos.”