hundred Canadian militia, with a handful of regulars, stopped this army of more than four thousand men with ten pieces of artillery, so that it was forced, with a loss of but thirty men killed, wounded and missing, to retreat twenty-four miles along the road it had cut with so much labor through the forest. Hampton, defeated by the blasts of a few bugles, took up his position again at the Four Corners, to wait further news from Wilkinson's division. [Illustration: Wilkinson Flotilla Amid the Thousand Isles.] The latter having concentrated his troops at Grenadier Island, embarked them again the same day that Hampton advanced, against orders, towards Montreal. Three hundred boats covering the river for miles, carried the infantry and artillery, while the cavalry, five hundred strong, marched along the bank. Beaten about by storms, drenched with rain, stranded on deceitful shoals, this grand fleet of batteaux crept so slowly towards the entrance of the St. Lawrence, that the army, dispirited and disgusted, railed on its commander and the government alike. They were two weeks in reaching the river. Wilkinson, who had been recalled from New Orleans, to take charge of this expedition, was prostrated by the lake fever, which, added to the infirmities of age, rendered him wholly unfit for the position he occupied. General Lewis, his second in command, was also sick. The season was already far advanced--the autumnal storms had set in earlier than usual--everything conspired to ensure defeat; and around this wreck of a commander, tossed an army, dispirited, disgusted, and doomed to disgrace. General Brown led the advance of this army of invasion, as it started for Montreal, a hundred and eighty miles distant. Approaching French Creek, eighteen miles below Grenadier Island, it was attacked by a fleet of boats from Kingston, but repulsed them with little loss. The news of the invasion, however, spreading, the British detachment at Kingston, reinforced by the militia, followed the descending flotilla, harassing it whenever an opportunity occurred. To a beholder the force seemed adequate to secure the object contemplated, for the spectacle it presented was grand and imposing. As the head of that vast fleet came winding around the bend of the stream and swept out of view below, the long procession of boats that streamed after seemed to be endless. Scattered in picturesque groups amid the Thousand Isles, or assailed with artillery from British forts--now swallowed up in the silent forest that clothed the banks, and again slowly drifting past the scattered settlements, or shooting the long and dangerous rapids, it presented a strange and picturesque appearance. When it reached the head of the long rapids at Hamilton, twenty miles below Ogdensburg, Wilkinson ordered General Brown to advance by land and cover the passage of the boats through the narrow defiles, where the enemy had established block houses. In the mean time the cavalry had crossed