or flambeaux. Porteous was in the midst of them, and as he refused to walk, he was carried by two of the rioters on what is in Scotland called the king's cushion, by which two persons alternately grasping each other's wrists, form a kind of seat on the backs of their hands, upon which a third may be placed. They were so cool as to halt when one of the slippers dropped from his foot, till it was picked up and replaced. The citizens of the better class looked from their windows on this extraordinary scene, but terrified beyond the power of interference, if they had possessed the will. In descending the West Bow, which leads to the place of execution, the rioters, or conspirators-a term, perhaps, more suited to men of their character-provided themselves with a coil of ropes, by breaking into the booth of a dealer in such articles, and left at the same time a guinea to pay for it; a precaution which would hardly have occurred to men of the lowest class, of which in external appearance the mob seemed to consist. A cry was next raised for the gallows, in order that Porteous might die according to all the ceremony of the law. But as this instrument of punishment was kept in a distant part of the town, so that time must be lost in procuring it, they proceeded to hang the unfortunate man over a dyer's pole, as near the place of execution as possible. The poor man's efforts to save himself only added to his tortures; for as he tried to keep hold of the beam to which he was suspended, they struck his hands with guns and Lochaber axes, to make him quit his hold, so that he suffered more than usual in the struggle which dismissed him from life. When Porteous was dead the rioters dispersed, withdrawing without noise or disturbance all the outposts which they had occupied for preventing interruption, and leaving the city so quiet, that had it not been for the relics of the fire which had been applied to the jail-door; the arms which lay scattered in disorder on the street, as the rioters had flung them down; and the dead body of Porteous, which remained suspended in the place where he died, there was no visible symptom of so violent an explosion of popular fury having taken place. The government, highly offended at such a daring contempt of authority, imposed on the Crown counsel the task of prosecuting the discovery of the rioters with the utmost care. The report of Mr. Charles Erskine, then SolicitorGeneral, was ably prepared, and bears witness to his exertions in tracing the reports, which were numerous, in assigning to various persons particular shares in this nocturnal outrage. All of them, however, when examined, proved totally groundless, and it was evident that they had been either wilful falsehoods sent abroad to deceive and mislead the investigators, or at least idle and unauthenticated rumours which arise out of such commotions, like bubbles on broken and distracted waters. A reward of two hundred pounds was offered by government for the discovery of any person concerned in the riot, but without success. Only a single person was proved to have been present at the mob, and the circumstances in which he stood placed him out of the reach of punishment. He was footman to a lady of rank, and a creature of weak intellects. Being sent into Edinburgh on a message by his mistress, he had drunk so much liquor as to deprive him of all capacity whatever, and in this state mixed with the mob, some of whom put a halberd in his hand. But the witnesses who proved this apparent accession to the mob, proved also that the accused could not stand without the support of the rioters, and was totally incapable of knowing for what purpose they were assembled, and consequently of approving of or aiding their guilt. He was acquitted accordingly, to the still further dissatisfaction of the ministry, and of Queen Caroline, who considered the commotion, and the impunity with which it was followed, as an insult to her personal authority. A bill was prepared and brought into Parliament, for the punishment of the city of Edinburgh, in a very vindictive spirit, proposing to abolish the city charter, demolish the city walls, take away the town-guard, and declare the provost incapable of holding any office of public trust. A long investigation took place on the occasion, in which many persons were examined at the bar of the House of Lords, without throwing the least light on the subject of the Porteous mob, or the character of the persons by whom it was conducted. The penai conclusions of the bill were strenuously combated by the Duke of Argyle, Duncan Forbes, and others, who represented the injustice of punishing with dishonour the capital of Scotland for the insolence of a lawless mob, which, taking advantage of a moment of security, had committed a great breach of the peace, attended with a cruel murder. As men's minds cooled, the obnoxious clauses were dropped out of the bill, and at length its penal consequences were restricted to a fine of £2,000 sterling on the city, to be paid for the use of Captain Porteous's widow. This person having received other favours from the town, accepted of £1,500 in full of the fine; and so ended the affair so far as the city of Edinburgh was concerned. It is, perhaps, scarcely necessary to remind our readers of the prominent place that the Porteous mob occupies in Scott's brilliant novel of the "Heart of Midlothian." We have preferred, graphic as that account is, to follow the quieter and more methodical, and also more historically accurate account which that same writer has given in his charming "Tales of a Grandfather," to which we refer such readers as are anxious for still further details of this very remarkable affair. AN OLD AMERICAN WAR FORT. JTS HISTORY AND MEMORIES. OUR illustration re- when Burgoyne took the fort of Ticonderoga, and rushed on to that fatal surrender which practically secured independence for America. Burgoyne was anxiously looking out for despatches, and glad indeed was he to receive them, for they tell him that as yet all is going well with the other British generals, and that the plans for the combined movement on the American centres are being so far successfully carried out. We can understand that in such a war it must have been very difficult for the British generals to communicate with one another. Many miles of hostile territory had to be traversed, for the bearer of the precious message had to contend against the opposing forces of nature and man. We can well believe, then, that great care would be used in the selection of a messenger, and that the accomplishment of tasks such as this would very speedily result in his promotion to important military posts. Of Fort Ticonderoga itself the follow 368 ing notice, which we slightly condense from the Pall Mall Gazette, will, we trust, be found interesting :— "The fort is now a ruin-perhaps not The less interesting on that account. very name carries us back to Indian days. The word means 'noisy flood,' and is derived from the rushing torrent which here empties the waters of Lake George into Champlain. The upper of the two lakes stands at a much higher level than its lowland sister, and the stream which unites them foams down a steep descent of some 230 feet in two series of pretty cascades, now much. degraded by the saw-mills and factories of the modern villages of Alexandria and Ticonderoga. Even in the undisturbed Indian days the spot possessed its own rude strategical importance, for it lay right on the war-trail of the Algonquins against the Iroquois, and commanded the mouth of the one practicable pass from the St. Lawrence basin across the Adirondacks to the upper waters of the Hudson River. All early European warfare in America regularly followed these Indian war-trails, because they were both alike determined by the natural lie of the country and the easiest roads between the great physical divisions of the Atlantic slope. No spot in the States, except the original Fort Frontenac, on Carlton Island in the St. Lawrence (also a part of New York State), is so rich in memories of the early French settlers and explorers as the site of Fort Ticonderoga. When Champlain, the founder of Quebec, had established his weak little colony on Cape Diamond in the early years of the seventeenth century, he made an offer to his friends, the Algonquins, to accompany them on a contemplated war-trail against the Iroquois. Turning southward along a main tributary of the St. Lawrence, now known as the Richelieu, after the great cardinal who sent him out, he came at last to the beautiful lake which still preserves the memory of his own name. Alone, with two servants, among his Indian hosts, the French explorer made his way up it in the light birch-bark canoes of his allies; and the whole party passed the dangerous corner of Ticonderoga, and successfully crept up the four miles of ascent to Lake George, without having given the alarm to their enemies, until they stood in the very heart of the Iroquois country. Champlain had brought fire-arms with him, and before these new weapons the terrified Iroquois could not stand. Just a century and a-half later, in 1756, the old fort of Ticonderoga was built by the French, to protect their territory from the hostile colonists of Those neighbouring New England. were the days when Montcalm had much for the sturdy English colonists, Pitt, ward into the Western prairies. Pitt, too, in his lordly fashion, would have no French empire on the Mississippi; and the force which he sent against Fort Duquesne effectually quashed Montcalm's schemes in that direction, and gave to the smoky capital of the modern Pennsylvanian coal-field its familiar name of Pittsburg. The first attack, however, upon Fort Ticonderoga, or Carillon as the French called it, though led by Abercrombie with sixteen thousand men, was a complete failure. But a year later, Pitt had changed his plan to one of complete destruction of the French empire, not merely in the Mississippi basin, but in America generally; and while Wolfe was ascending the mouth of the St. Lawrence, Amherst marched over the Hudson watershed and took Ticonderoga without a blow. That, with the fall of Quebec, was the end of the French dominion in North America. During the revolutionary wars Ticonderoga came to the front once more. At the very beginning of the struggle, while it was yet a rebellion rather than a revolution, it occurred to those famous guerillas the Green Mountain Boys, from the wooded ranges of Vermont over yonder, that they might as well secure themselves against possible attacks on the Canadian side; so they marched quietly one fine May morning to Ticonderoga, under their celebrated leader, Ethan Allen; silently entered the open gates in the early dawn; and surprised the commandant in bed, summoning him to surrender, with old Puritan solemnity, in the name of the great Jehovah and the Continental Congress.' The commandant, urged by the logic of Ethan Allen's sword pointed at his breast, immediately surrendered the fort without further parley. For two years the Americans held it safely, till Burgoyne began his fatal march from Canada upon Saratoga, still along the well-worn war-trail of the Algonquins. The British commander planted his guns on Mount Defiance, that higher and steeper brown hill beyond the fort which the French engineers had considered impracticable for artillery in their own day; and the American general, finding the new batteries commanded all his guns, abandoned the post without a shot. Burgoyne marched on to Saratoga, over the great tourist road now yearly covered by thousands of sightseers, and there found himself forced to that inevitable surrender which practically settled the independence of the Northern States at least. As one sits on American soil, looking across the narrow neck of water, from the rider of a snake fence on the Vermont shore to the battered and ruined walls of the mouldering fortress opposite, how utterly dead and gone and antiquated it all sounds nowadays, like the dim echo of some fabulous Greek tale or some forgotten Scandinavian saga! When one turns to the thriving New England farms, and the big-funnelled locomotives of the Lake Shore line, and the steamers hurrying up with foaming paddle-wheels towards the port at the Canadian frontier, how incredible it seems that men of English race and blood should ever have fought with one another on these green hillocks for the possession of the plank road from Lake Champlain to Lake George, and the passage of the narrow shallow valley from Caldwell to Saratoga! Nowadays, the through trains and steamers of the Grand Trunk and the Rensselaer and Saratoga Railway convey great batches of tourists through all the summer months from Montreal down the two lakes to Albany and Boston. A line of rail occupies the war-trail of Algonquin or Iroquois; and the key to the pass between the headwaters of the Hudson and the St. Lawrence valley is crowned only by a few picturesque straggling walls, with a tiny wooden pier projecting beside them into the calm bosom of the sleepy lake." |