"You could hardly say much," said Jules, "after the rate at which you kicked round your great Scotch legs with great peril to the more civilized shins of your neighbors. You have doubtless forgotten that, since you were not content with French cotillons, such as are accepted among all civilized people, to please you we had to have Scotch reels. The music for these our fiddler picked up by ear in an instant. It was a very simple matter; he merely had to scrape his strings till they screeched as if a lot of cats were shut up in a bag and some one were pulling their tails." "Oh, you are a bad lot," said the captain; "but won't you come and take supper with us to-morrow, you and your friend, and make your peace with the family?" "That's the way to talk, now!" said Jules. "Listen to the irrepressible," retorted Marcheterre. As it was now very late, the party broke up, after drinking the health of the old sailor and his son and pronouncing the eulogies they deserved for the part they had played that night. The young men had to stay some days at St. Thomas. The flood continued. The roads were deluged. The nearest bridge, even supposing it had escaped the general disaster, was some leagues southwest of the village, and the rain came down in torrents. They were obliged to wait till the river should be clear of ice, so as to cross in a boat below the falls. They divided their time between the seigneur's family, their other friends, and poor Dumais, whom the seigneur would not permit to be moved. The sick man entertained them with stories of his fights against the English and their savage allies, and with accounts of the manners and customs of the aborigines. "Although I am a native of St. Thomas," said Dumais one day, "I was brought up in the parish of Sorel. When I was ten years old and my brother nine, while we were in the woods one day picking raspberries a party of Iroquois surprised and captured us. After a long march, we came to the place where their canoe was hidden among the brambles by the water's edge; and they took us to one of the islands of the St. Lawrence. My father and his three brothers, armed to the teeth, set out to rescue us. They were only four against ten; but I may say without boasting that my father and my uncles were not exactly the kind of men to be trifled with. They were tall, broad-chested fellows, with their shoulders well set back.