morning, September 10, than he set all the principal
officers to work out the different parts of it. But he
kept the whole a secret. Nobody except himself knew more
than one part, and how that one part was to be worked in
at the proper time and place. Even the fact that the Anse
au Foulon was to be the landing-place was kept secret
till the last moment from everybody except Admiral Holmes,
who made all the arrangements, and Captain Chads, the
naval officer who was to lead the first boats down. The
great plot thickened fast. The siege that had been an
affair of weeks, and the brigadiers' plan that had been
an affair of days, both gave way to a plan in which every
hour was made to tell. Wolfe's seventy hours of consummate
manoeuvres, by land and water, over a front of thirty
miles, were followed by a battle in which the fighting
of only a few minutes settled the fate of Canada for
centuries.

During the whole of those momentous three days--Monday,
Tuesday, and Wednesday, September 10, 11, and 12, 1759
--Wolfe, Saunders, and Holmes kept the French in constant
alarm about the thirteen miles _above_ Cap Rouge and the
six miles _below_ Quebec; but gave no sign by which any
immediate danger could be suspected along the nine miles
between Cap Rouge and Quebec.

Saunders stayed below Quebec. On the 12th he never gave
the French a minute's rest all day and night. He sent
Cook and others close in towards Beauport to lay buoys,
as if to mark out a landing-place for another attack like