the adverse hosts could meet. A wide and apparently an impervious
boundary of forests severed the possessions of the hostile provinces
of France and England. The hardy colonist, and the trained European who
fought at his side, frequently expended months in struggling against
the rapids of the streams, or in effecting the rugged passes of the
mountains, in quest of an opportunity to exhibit their courage in a more
martial conflict. But, emulating the patience and self-denial of the
practiced native warriors, they learned to overcome every difficulty;
and it would seem that, in time, there was no recess of the woods so
dark, nor any secret place so lovely, that it might claim exemption
from the inroads of those who had pledged their blood to satiate their
vengeance, or to uphold the cold and selfish policy of the distant
monarchs of Europe.

Perhaps no district throughout the wide extent of the intermediate
frontiers can furnish a livelier picture of the cruelty and fierceness
of the savage warfare of those periods than the country which lies
between the head waters of the Hudson and the adjacent lakes.

The facilities which nature had there offered to the march of the
combatants were too obvious to be neglected. The lengthened sheet of
the Champlain stretched from the frontiers of Canada, deep within the
borders of the neighboring province of New York, forming a natural
passage across half the distance that the French were compelled to
master in order to strike their enemies. Near its southern termination,
it received the contributions of another lake, whose waters were so
limpid as to have been exclusively selected by the Jesuit missionaries
to perform the typical purification of baptism, and to obtain for it
the title of lake "du Saint Sacrement." The less zealous English thought
they conferred a sufficient honor on its unsullied fountains, when they