Both parties were to meet at Mountain Street, and force Prescott Gate. The snow was falling fast, and furious winds were piling it in frightful drifts. Cautiously Montgomery led his men in the dark toward the narrowest point under Cape Diamond, called _Pres de Ville_, where the enemy had planted a battery of three pounders. * This post was in charge of a captain of Canadian militia, with thirty-eight men, and nine British seamen, under Captain Barnsfare, master of a transport, to work the guns. On the river side was a precipice, and on the left the rough crags of dark slate towered far above him. When within fifty yards of the battery, the Americans halted to reconnoiter. The guard at the battery and the artillerymen with lighted matches were perfectly silent, and Montgomery concluded that they were not on the alert. But Barnsfare, through the dim light of early dawn and the drifting snow, saw faintly their movements. Montgomery, in the van of his troops, cried out, "Men of New York, you will not fear to follow where your general leads. March on!" and rushed boldly over heaps of ice and snow to charge the battery. At that moment, when the Americans were within forty paces, Captain Barnsfare gave the word, the match was applied, and a discharge of grape-shot swept the American column with terrible effect. Montgomery, Major M'Phunn his aid, and Captain Cheeseman were killed, together with several privates near. The rest, appalled at the dreadful havoc and the death of their general, fled in confusion back to Wolfe's Cove, where Colonel Campbell took the command, but made no further attempts to force a junction with Arnold. Ten minutes the battery belched its iron storm in the dim space, but, after the first discharge, there was no enemy there to slaughter. ** * Judge Henry, who was one of the American prisoners at Quebec, was allowed, with some others, to go out and see the place where Montgomery was slain. He thus describes the British fortification there: It was a sort of block-house forty or fifty feet square. The logs, neatly hewn, were tightly bound together by dove-tail work. The lower story contained loop-holes for musketry, so narrow that those within could not be harmed by those without. The upper story had four or more port-holes for cannon of a large caliber. These guns were charged with grape and canister shot, and were pointed with exactness toward the avenue at Cape Diamond. The block-house seemed to take up the space between the foot of the hill and the river, leaving only a cart-way on each side. The bulwarks of the city came only to the edge of the hill, above that place; hence down the side of the precipice, slantingly to the brink of the river, there was a stockade of strong posts fifteen or twenty feet high, knit together by a stout railing at bottom and top with pins. It was asserted that Montgomery sawed four of these posts himself, so as to admit four men abreast to attack the block-house.