Culloden, while the French named their entrenched camp at Ticonderoga Fort Carillon, or the "Chime of Bells," in allusion to the music of the waterfalls in the outlet stream flowing beside it between the lakes.

Bitter enemies thus holding either end of Lake George, it became a constant battleground. In 1757, after numerous skirmishes, a considerable British and Colonial force was collected at Forts Edward and William Henry, intended to attack Carillon and Crown Point and drive the French down Lake Champlain. General Montcalm then commanded the French, and learning what was going on, and that the main British force was at Fort Edward, he swiftly traversed the lake with a large army and cut off and besieged Fort William Henry, garrisoned by twenty-five hundred men. The commander at Fort Edward was afraid to send reinforcements, and after a few days the British garrison, their guns dismounted and their works almost destroyed, were forced to capitulate. No sooner had they laid down their arms and marched out of the fort and an adjacent entrenched camp, than the Indian allies of the French, the fierce Hurons, fell upon them, plundering indiscriminately and murdering all they could reach, there being fifteen hundred killed or carried into captivity, and over a hundred women slain, with the worst barbarities of the savage. Montcalm did his best to restrain them, but was powerless. The fort was an irregular bastioned square, formed by gravel embankments, surmounted by a rampart of heavy logs laid in tiers, the interstices filled with earth, and it was built almost at the edge of the lake, the site being now occupied by a hotel. The French spent several days demolishing it. The barracks were torn down and the huge logs of the rampart thrown into a heap. The dead bodies filling the casemates were added to the mass, which was set fire, and the mighty funeral pyre blazed all night. Then the French sailed away on the lake, and Parkman says "no living thing was left but the wolves that gathered from the mountains to feast upon the dead." When the English on the subsequent day sent a scouting party from Fort Edward they found a horrible scene; the fires were still burning, and the smoke and stench were suffocating, the half-consumed corpses broiling upon the embers. The fort had mounted nineteen cannon and a few mortars, a train of artillery which Johnson had highly prized. The French carried these guns off with them to Carillon, and they afterwards had a chequered history. The English subsequently retook them at Carillon, and changed the name of that fort to Ticonderoga. At the dawn of the Revolution, Ethan Allen and his Vermonters surprised Ticonderoga and got them. Then the guns were drawn on sledges to Boston, and did notable service in the American siege and capture of that city, afterwards going into many engagements with Washington's army.

ATTACKING CARILLON.

The Lake George outlet stream, which the French called Carillon, from its waterfalls, was known by the Indians as Ticonderoga, or "the sounding waters." It winds through a ridge about four miles wide between the lakes, is pretty but turbulent, and falls down two series of cascades, giving music and water-power to the paper and other mills at the villages of Alexandria and Ticonderoga, the descent being two hundred and thirty feet. The upper cascade at Alexandria goes down rapids descending two hundred feet in a mile, and the lower cascade is a perpendicular fall of thirty feet at Ticonderoga, this village being called by its people "Ty," for short. Here stood the original French Fort Carillon guarding the pass at the verge of Lake Champlain. After the horrible massacre at Fort William Henry, the British colonists determined upon revenge, and General James Abercrombie, who had been made the Commander-in-Chief of all the British forces in North America through political influence, gathered an army of nearly sixteen thousand men at the head of the lake, while Montcalm was at Carillon with barely one-fourth the number. Abercrombie, however, was little more than the nominal British commander. General Wolfe described him as a "heavy man;" and another soldier wrote that he was "an aged gentleman, infirm in body and mind." The British Government meant that the actual command should be in the hands of General Lord Howe, who was in fact the real chief, described by Wolfe as "that great man" and "the noblest Englishman that has appeared in my time, and the best soldier in the British army;" while Pitt called him "a character of ancient times; a complete model of military virtue." This young nobleman, then in his thirty-fourth year, was Viscount George Augustus Howe, in the Irish peerage, the oldest of the three famous Howe brothers who took part in the American wars. The army, Parkman says, "felt him from General to drummer-boy." In that army were also two future famous men, Israel Putnam and John Stark.

They advanced northward on Lake George, July 5, 1758, in a grand flotilla of over a thousand boats, with two floating castles, the procession brilliant with rich uniforms and waving banners, and the music from its many bands echoing from the enclosing hills. Fenimore Cooper, in Satanstoe, gives a vivid description of this pageant. Passing beyond the Narrows, Abercrombie, on a Sunday morning, landed upon the fertile Sabbath Day Point to refresh his men before making the attack, thus naming it. Among them was Major Rogers, the Ranger, and in front could be seen the steep and rugged cliff of Rogers' Slide, named after him, its face a comparatively smooth inclined plane of naked rock, rising four hundred feet. The tale, as Rogers told it, was, that the previous winter, fleeing from the Indians, he practiced upon them a ruse, making them believe he had actually slid down this rock to the frozen surface of the lake. He was on snowshoes, the savages following, and ran out to the edge of the precipice, casting down his knapsack and provision-bag. Then turning around and wearing his snowshoes backward, he went to a neighboring ravine, and making his way safely down, fled over the ice to the head of the lake. The Indians saw the double set of shoe-marks in the snow, and concluded two men had jumped down rather than be captured. They saw Rogers going off over the ice, and believing he had safely slid down the face of the cliff, regarded him as specially protected by the Great Spirit and abandoned the pursuit. Thus has his name clung to the remarkable rock, though he was said to be a great braggart, and there were people who suggested that he ought to have been a leading member of the "Ananias Club." Beyond the slide, at the foot of the lake, is the low-lying Prisoners' Island, where the British kept the captives they took, and nearby Howe's Landing, where the army landed to attack Fort Carillon.

There was then a dense forest covering almost all the surface between the lakes, greatly obstructed by undergrowth, and Montcalm had protected his position at Carillon with massive breastworks of logs, eight or nine feet high, having in front masses of trees cut down with their tops turned outwards, thus making it almost impossible for an enemy to get through, the sharpened points of the broken branches bristling like the quills of a porcupine. As the British troops advanced in four columns, they got much mixed up in the forest and undergrowth, and Howe, with Putnam and a force of rangers at the head of the principal column, although they could not see ahead, suddenly came upon the French, were challenged, and a hot skirmish followed, in which Howe was shot through the breast and dropped dead. Then all was confusion, but they beat this French advanced force and killed or captured most of them. The loss of Howe, however, was irretrievable, for Abercrombie, deprived of his