On the next day there was a grand council. Morris made a speech, in which he indiscreetly told the Indians that the King of France had given all the country to the King of England. Luckily, his auditors received the announcement with ridicule rather than anger. The chiefs, however, wished to kill him; but Pontiac interposed, on the ground that the life of an ambassador should be held sacred. “He made a speech,” says Morris, “which does him honor, and shows that he was acquainted with the law of nations.” He seemed in a mood more pacific than could have been expected, and said privately to Godefroy: “I will lead the nations to war no more. Let them be at peace if they choose; but I will never be a friend to the English. I shall be a wanderer in the woods; and, if they come there to seek me, I will shoot at them while I have an arrow left.” Morris thinks that he said this in a fit of despair, and that, in fact, he was willing to come to terms. The day following was an unlucky one. One of Morris’s Indians, a Mohawk chief, ran off, having first stolen all he could lay hands on, and sold the ambassador’s stack of rum, consisting of two barrels, to the Ottawas. A scene of frenzy ensued. A young Indian ran up to Morris, and stabbed at him savagely; but Godefroy caught the assassin’s hand, and saved his patron’s life. Morris escaped from the camp, and lay hidden in a cornfield till the howling and screeching subsided, and the Indians slept themselves sober. When he returned, an Indian, called the Little Chief, gave him a volume of Shakespeare,——the spoil of some slaughtered officer,——and then begged for gunpowder. Having first gained Pontiac’s consent, Morris now resumed his journey to the Illinois. The river was extremely low, and it was with much ado that they pushed their canoe against the shallow current, or dragged it over stones and sandbars. On the fifth day, they met an Indian mounted on a handsome white horse, said to have belonged to General Braddock, and to have been captured at the defeat of his army, nine years before. On the morning of the seventh day, they reached the neighborhood of Fort Miami. This post, captured during the preceding year, had since remained without a garrison; and its only tenants were the Canadians, who had built their houses within its palisades, and a few Indians, who thought fit to make it their temporary abode. The meadows about the fort were dotted with the lodges of the Kickapoos, a large band of whom had recently arrived; but the great Miami village was on the opposite side of the stream, screened from sight by the forest which intervened.