Over the rocks they had to take care; and in the dense,
obstructing scrub they had to haul through by main force.
But this was child's play to what awaited them in the
slimy, shifting, and boulder-strewn bog they had to pass
before reaching the hillocks which commanded Louisbourg.

The first attempts here were disastrous. The guns sank
out of sight in the engulfing bog; while the toiling men
became regular human targets for shot and shell from
Louisbourg. It was quite plain that the British batteries
could never be built on the hillocks if the guns had
nothing to keep them from a boggy grave, and if the men
had no protection from the French artillery. But a
ship-builder colonel, Meserve of New Hampshire, came to
the rescue by designing a gun-sleigh, sixteen feet in
length and five in the beam. Then the crews were told
off again, two hundred men for each sleigh, and orders
were given that the work should not be done except at
night or under cover of the frequent fogs. After this,
things went much better than before. But the labour was
tremendous still; while the danger from random shells
bursting among the boulders was not to be despised. Four
hundred struggling feet, four hundred straining arms--each
team hove on its long, taut cable through fog, rain, and
the blackness of the night, till every gun had been towed
into one of the batteries before the walls. The triumph
was all the greater because the work grew, not easier,
but harder as it progressed. The same route used twice
became an impassable quagmire. So, when the last two
hundred men had wallowed through, the whole ensnaring