reason, however, for neglecting to occupy it, was the deficiency of
troops to man the works already constructed, rather than the supposed
inaccessibility of Mount Defiance. It is singular that the French never
fortified this height, standing, as it does, in the quarter whence they
must have looked for the advance of a British army.

In my first view of the ruins, I was favored with the scientific guidance
of a young lieutenant of engineers, recently from West Point, where he
bad gained credit for great military genius. I saw nothing but confusion
in what chiefly interested him; straight lines and zigzags, defence
within defence, wall opposed to wall, and ditch intersecting ditch;
oblong squares of masonry below the surface of the earth, and huge
mounds, or turf-covered hills of stone, above it. On one of these
artificial hillocks, a pine-tree has rooted itself, and grown tall and
strong, since the banner-staff was levelled. But where my unmilitary
glance could trace no regularity, the young lieutenant was perfectly at
home. He fathomed the meaning of every ditch, and formed an entire plan
of the fortress from its half-obliterated lines. His description of
Ticonderoga would be as accurate as a geometrical theorem, and as barren
of the poetry that has clustered round its decay. I viewed Ticonderoga
as a place of ancient strength, in ruins for half a century: where the
flags of three nations had successively waved, and none waved now; where
armies had struggled, so long ago that the bones of the slain were
mouldered; where Peace had found a heritage in the forsaken haunts of
War. Now the young West-Pointer, with his lectures on ravelins,
counterscarps, angles, and covered ways, made it an affair of brick and
mortar and hewn stone, arranged on certain regular principles, having a
good deal to do with mathematics, but nothing at all with poetry.

I should have been glad of a hoary veteran to totter by my side, and tell