The French troops, greatly outnumbering ours, came up with the English outposts, who were fortifying themselves at a place on the confines of Pennsylvania where the great city of Pittsburg now stands.

A Virginian officer with but forty men was in no condition to resist twenty times that number of Canadians, who appeared before his incomplete works.

He was suffered to draw back without molestation; and the French, taking possession of his fort, strengthened it, and christened it by the name of the Canadian governor, Du Quesne.

Up to this time no actual blow of war had been struck.

The troops representing the hostile nations were in presence--the guns were loaded, but no one as yet had cried "Fire." It was strange, that in a savage forest of Pennsylvania, a young Virginian officer should fire a shot, and waken up a war which was to last for sixty years, which was to cover his own country and pass into Europe, to cost France her American colonies, to sever ours from us, and create the great Western republic; to rage over the Old World when extinguished in the New; and, of all the myriads engaged in the vast contest, to leave the prize of the greatest fame with him who struck the first blow! He little knew of the fate in store for him.