He did little or nothing,
however, besides capturing a few stragglers. On the sixteenth, early in
the evening, a party of English, led by Wolfe, dashed forward, drove off
a band of French volunteers, seized a rising ground called
Hauteur-de-la-Potence, or Gallows Hill, and began to entrench themselves
scarcely three hundred yards from the Dauphin's Bastion. The town opened
on them furiously with grapeshot; but in the intervals of the firing the
sound of their picks and spades could plainly be heard. In the morning
they were seen throwing up earth like moles as they burrowed their way
forward; and on the twenty-first they opened another parallel, within
two hundred yards of the rampart. Still their sappers pushed on. Every
day they had more guns in position, and on right and left their fire
grew hotter. Their pickets made a lodgment along the foot of the glacis,
and fired up the slope at the French in the covered way.
The twenty-first was a memorable day. In the afternoon a bomb fell on
the ship "Celebre" and set her on fire. An explosion followed. The few
men on board could not save her, and she drifted from her moorings. The
wind blew the flames into the rigging of the "Entreprenant," and then
into that of the "Capricieux." At night all three were in full blaze;
for when the fire broke out the English batteries turned on them a
tempest of shot and shell to prevent it from being extinguished.
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