"How admirably you have put it, my dear Monsieur Brierley; I have to thank you most sincerely. Ah! you Americans are always clear and to the point. May I add one more word? That which made these birds so cunning was the fact that you were out to _kill_ them." Here he straightened up, his back to the fire, and stood with the light of its blaze tingeing his gray beard. "It's a foolish fancy, I know, but I would have liked to have lived, if only for one day, with the man Adam, just to see how he and Madame Eve and the Noah's ark family got on before they began quarrelling and Cain made a hole in the head of the other monsieur. I have an idea that the lion and the lamb ate out of the same trough, with the birds on their backs for company--all the world at peace. My Coco rubs his beak against my cheek, not because I feed him, but because he trusts me; he would, I am sure, bite a piece out of Monsieur Louis' because he does not trust him--and with reason," and the old man smiled good-naturedly. "But why don't they all trust us?" Herbert, who had also for some reason entirely missed Brierley's humor, fumbled for an instant with the end of a match he had picked from the cloth, and then, tossing it quickly from him as if he had at last framed the sentence he was about to utter, said in a thoughtful tone: "I have often wondered what the world would be like if all fear of every kind was abolished--of punishment, of bodily hurt, and of pain? Everything that swims, flies, or walks is afraid of something else--women of men, men of each other. The first thing an infant does is to cry out--not from the pain, but from fright--just as a small dog or the cub of a bear hides under its mother's coat before its eyes are open. It is the ogre, Fear, that begins with the milk and ends with the last breath in terror over the unknown, and it is our fault. Half the children in the world--perhaps three-fourths of them--have been brought up by fear and not by love." "How about the lambasting your father gave you, Herbert, when you hooked it from school? 'Spare the rod and spoil the--' You know the rest of it. Did you deserve it?" "Probably I did," laughed Herbert. "But, all the same, Louis, that foolish line has done more harm in the world than any line ever written. Many a brute of a father--not mine, for he did what he thought was right--has found excuse in those half-dozen words for his temper when he beat his boy." "Oh, come, let us get back to dry ground, gentlemen," broke in Brierley. "We commenced on birds and we've brought up on moral suasion with the help of a birch-rod. Nobody has yet answered my argument: What about the birds and the way they play it on Peter and me?" and again Brierley winked at me. "It's because you tricked them first, Brierley," returned Herbert in all seriousness and in all sincerity. "They got suspicious and outwitted you, and they will every time. A beast never forgets treachery. I know of a dozen instances to prove it."