General Wilkinson proceeded down the Sault and joined Browne, near Cornwall. Hampton was confidently expected. The commander-in-chief had positively instructed his general of division to form a junction with the army from Sackett's Harbour at Cornwall, and he had not come. Wilkinson, sick in body, and not a little mortified by the late defeat, did not know very well what to do. To retreat by the way he came was not quite so easy as to advance. The rapids presented innumerable difficulties in the way of ascent, with an enemy lining the banks of the river. And that which was more annoying forced itself strongly upon his mind--the Canadians were both loyal and brave. His agony was most excruciating when he received a letter from Hampton to the effect that the Plattsburgh-Grand-Junction-Invading-Army was marching as expeditiously as circumstances would allow out of Canada; that, in a word it had been defeated and was in full retreat upon Champlain. An anathema was about to be coupled by the worthy and much irritated commander-in-chief with the name of Hampton, when Wilkinson recollected that he too had been checked in the most extraordinary way, in the very outset of a scheme so well calculated to subdue a country, only occupied by three thousand soldiers, scattered over a frontier of upwards of a thousand miles, and numbers of militia, formidable enough in the woods, but no match for a well disciplined, well provided, and numerous army, in the open field. The British regulars, elated with their late success, were in his rear. A kind of highland glen was not far in advance. He was fairly puzzled, and altogether wanting in that energy and decision so necessary for success in war. He called a council of his officers and communicated to them his fears. It was unanimously resolved that, for the present season, the attack on Montreal should be abandoned and that the army should cross the river to the American side and go into winter quarters. And accordingly the attack was abandoned. The Americans embarked again, and were taken to Salmon River. The boats and batteaux were immediately scuttled; the troops were made comfortable in long log huts or barracks, with astonishing celerity, and the camp, at French Mills, was as speedily as possible entrenched. Thus ended a campaign for which the Americans had made extraordinary preparations, and of the success of which high expectations had consequently been formed. The failures of Hampton and Wilkinson were indeed so disgraceful and so humiliating to the Americans that they were only compensated for, in kind, by the no less stupid, disgraceful, and humiliating failures of the British at Plattsburgh and New Orleans, with which the American war was, for both Americans and British, unfortunately concluded. All chance of invasion, on a grand scale, being now completely gone, the Canadian militia were disbanded for the winter.