port of civil Government, and other contingent charges, and of sundry other drafts of the above Committees, &c., which have not been presented for payment.

HENRY GARDNER, Treasurer.

To the Honourable the Continental Congress, now sitting at Philadelphia.

EXTRACT OF A LETTER FROM QUTEBECK, DATED OCTOBER 25, 1775.

A good many of the Rebels have deserted and enlisted in Colonel McLean’s Highlanders, and about one hundred and fifty of them have deserted to Major Preston in Fort St. John’s. That fort begins to be short of provisions, and is blocked up by the main body of the Rebels, consisting of near two thousand men. General Carleton, with a party of seven hundred men, is by this time marched to their relief, and Colonel McLean is gone for the same purpose, by another route, with three hundred and fifty men. They intend to attack the Rebels in their intrenchments, and at the same time Major Preston is to sally out with his garrison from the fort. If the Rebels are beat, the fort will be supplied with provisions for the winter; if not, they will make the best retreat they can to Montreal. We have here a man of war’s snow and an armed brig belonging to the navy, under the command of a Lieutenant, and three or four armed vessels with about three hundred seamen on board, taken up by General Carleton, and we hear there is another man of war on her passage in the river. There are several passengers going for England in the ships that are now sailing from here. Some of them will give very unfavourable accounts of our situation; but you need not give much credit to what they say, for their tale will be suggested by their fears. Walker has been taken up, by order of General Carleton, for corresponding with the Rebels, and spiriting up the Canadians to take up arms against Government. He is in irons on board the Gaspee, armed vessel, together with the New-England Colonel Allen, Major Hezen, and Captain Turner.

EXTRACT OF ANOTHER LETTER FROM QUEBECK, DATED OCTOBER 25, 1775.

Amongst the many groundless reports which were daily spread about in the Province during the last spring and summer, there have been several relating to Mr. Walker, of Montreal. The friends of the Quebeck Bill were so exasperated against him for his spirited conduct on the Committee that drew up the petitions to Parliament against it, that they began to plan his ruin. When the Congress sent their first address to the Canadians, and Mr. Cushing, (an old and particular acquaintance of Mr. Walker’s, when he resided at Boston, ) sent him a packet of them, printed in French, to distribute, Mr. Walker made no secret of his having received this packet, as we had long before received that address in the newspapers, and translated copies of it had been handed about the Country by the French themselves. However, Rouville and Cugnet took occasion from it to tell the Governour in publick, at his table, that Mr. Walker corresponded with the Congress; and when that shameful insult, of which I sent you an account, was offered to His Majesty’s marble bust at Montreal, on the day on which the Quebeck Act took place, mention was again made of Mr. Walker by his enemies, as having a concern in that odious business. But fortunately (if I can with propriety say so) for him in that matter, he was at that time, and had been for some days before, very ill with the rheumatism, under the care of Doctor Beaumont. One day Rouville got into a dispute with him and others in the market in Montreal. What the dispute began upon, is not material, but Rouville would support this position, Que le roi est maitre, that is, that the King is master, or that his will must always be complied with. Mr. Walker said, very coolly, “that with regard to Monsieur de Rouville it might be so, as he eat of His Majesty’s bread; but,” said he, “I deny that the King is my master. I respect him as my lawful Sovereign and King, and am ready to pay due obedience to his lawful commands; but I cannot acknowledge him for my master while I live by my own industry. When I receive pay from him, I will acknowledge him for my master.”

Rouville immediately wrote to the Governour an account of this conversation, and added, that he had made no reply to Mr. Walker; and in a few days he received an answer from the Governour, which he showed to several persons at Montreal, in which the Governour commends his prudence, and promises not to forget him. And accordingly he was soon after named for one of the Judges of Montreal, to the great surprise and astonishment of all the French inhabitants, who had conceived an ill opinion and a strong dislike of him, from his behaviour in the office of a Judge, of some kind or other, many years ago in the time of the French Government. This Mr. Rouville is remarkable for taking every opportunity (as he speaks a little English) to throw himself in the way of the English inhabitants of Montreal, in order to pick up what tales he can, to send them up to the Governour; and this has been so well known to be his practice, that many persons have amused themselves with leading him into mistakes, by opening their letters in his presence at the post-office, (where he was always sure to be, ) and mentioning things as if they read them in the letters, and of which not a word was said in them. And it was while Mr. Rouville was thus upon the hunt for private anecdotes amongst the English inhabitants of Montreal, that Mr. Walker fell into the above dispute with him. This dispute, together with many invectives from some of the military gentlemen, who were particularly severe, and gave themselves many airs, styling the members of our Committee that prepared the petitions to Parliament, Rebels, and construing our dislike of the Quebeck Bill into a spirit of opposition to Government, and declaring that they hoped every moment to receive orders to take us up; I say the conversations of this kind, which were frequently heard, (though chiefly indeed among the young and inconsiderate, ) yet had so ugly an appearance, and so bad a tendency, that they determined Mr. Walker, in the month of May, to go to his country house at Assumption, to the pot-ash works which he had erected there, and amuse himself with those, and with his farm, merely for the sake of being out of the way of such conversations, and out of the reach of the calumny of his enemies. But all would not do; for it would be impossible in the space of a letter to relate the many artful reports that have been spread to set his fellow-citizens against him, that he might with the greater ease be made a sacrifice to their resentment. One time, it was reported that packets of letters to him and others had been intercepted, which were answers to letters wrote by him; at another that letters from him had been taken; then, that two Canadians were taken up and in prison, who had brought letters for him from the southward; then, that he had been over the river with the Provincials. Once, it was asserted here that he and two other persons were taken up and imprisoned, and that three more persons at Quebeck were soon to be so; then, it was said that he had quitted the Province, and, afterwards, that he was fortifying himself. Mr. John Bondfield, having business up the country, called on him at Assumption, and mentioning these reports, and that we had publickly contradicted them at Quebeck, it was the first time he had heard of them; for he had not been easier or quieter for a long while, as he saw nobody but his own people, and amused himself on his farm, and with reading. But as things grew worse and worse, and our military preparations went on with vigour, (so that those who did not carry fire and sword in words and action were suspected of favouring the Provincials, ) nothing was talked of but parties of men to take up people; and on these occasions Mr. Walker’s name was always uppermost. And at last, on the 7th of October, the postman brought the news, that just as he left Montreal, Mr. Walker had been brought in there a prisoner; that General Carleton had sent out in the night, with the greatest secrecy, an officer and thirty soldiers from Montreal, who were to receive their orders on their arrival at a certain place; and that these orders were to take him and bring him to Town, (as the officer said, ) dead or alive. They accordingly surrounded his house just about daybreak, and summoned him to surrender; on which he flew to his arms, choosing rather the loss of life than to suffer what he thought he might expect from the soldiery, when employed on such an errand, in such troublesome times as these. He defended himself a long while with great courage, and wounded