Still following the sheep-paths that zigzag about so as nearly to double the distance, I next turned back toward the harbor, leaving on my right the bleak and wind-swept field in which, to the lasting reproach of New England, five hundred of her bravest sons lie without stone or monument to mark their last resting-place. It is true that most of these men died of disease, and not in battle; yet to see the place as I saw it, in all its pitiful nakedness, isolation, and neglect, is the one thing at Louisburg that a New Englander would gladly have missed; and he will be very apt to walk on with a slower and less confident step, and with something less of admiration for the glory which consigns men to such oblivion as this. Royal Battery. To give anything like an adequate idea of how skilfully all the peculiarities of the ground were in some cases made use of in forming the defences, or in others, with equal art, overcome, would require a long chapter to itself. In order to render the main fortress more secure, the French engineer officers selected a spot three-fourths of a mile above it, on the harbor shore, on which they erected a battery that raked the open roadstead with its fire. It was a very strong factor in the system of defences as against a sea attack. This isolated work was called the Royal Battery, or in the English accounts, the Grand Battery. Yet, so far from contributing to the successful defence of the fortress, it became, in the hands of the besiegers, a powerful auxiliary to its capture. But the whole system of defence here shows that the marshes extending on the side of Gabarus Bay, where a landing was practicable only in calm weather, were considered an insuperable obstacle to the movements of artillery; and without artillery Louisburg could never have been seriously attacked from the land side. Against a sea attack it was virtually impregnable. III LOUISBURG TO SOLVE IMPORTANT POLITICAL AND MILITARY PROBLEMS Having glanced at the purely military exigencies, which had at length forced themselves upon the attention of French statesmen, and having gone over the ground with the view of impressing its topographical features more firmly in our minds, we may now look at the underlying political and economic causes, out of which the French court finally matured a scheme for the maintenance of their colonial possessions in Canada in the broadest sense. French Colonial System. Its Unsatisfactory Workings.