dyke and palisade that the glory of France might be upheld on the new continent. A hundred guns were mounted in the embrasures of the main battlement, and seventy more upon the outworks of Lighthouse Point and Battery Island. Six hundred picked regulars filled the caserns, and there was a large body of armed citizens. Louisbourg, the insouciant, boasted that so impregnable were her bulwarks that, if need be, wives and mothers of the town could keep the garrison gates.
The fortifications were scarcely completed when war was again declared between France and England. The New Englanders had for a long time chafed against the rising power of their neighbours on the north and in 1745, after a siege lasting many weeks, forced the surrender of "the best equipped fortress in North America" under conditions which have not yet ceased to astonish the world. Colonel Pepperell, a former merchant who had attained high position in the Massachusetts militia, commanded the land attack from Gabarus Bay, on the south. Admiral Warren was at the head of the fleet.
The outline of the New Englanders' camps is still traceable above Kennington Cove. Remnants of the French stockade and breast-works, and a wall pierced by four crumbling arches are to be seen by driving south a short way from New Louisbourg. On the spot where Pepperell accepted from Governor Duchambon the keys of the
