"Our sachems tell us that such is the way of man," said the Onondaga, also in pure French. "Vain boasters dwell too in our own villages. For reasons that I do not know, Manitou has put the foolish as well as the wise into the world." "To travel, Tayoga, is to find wisdom. We learn what other people know, and we learn to value also the good that we have at home." "It is so, my friend Lennox. It is only when we go into strange countries and listen to the tongues of the idle and the foolish that we learn the full worth of our own." "It is not wise, Tayoga, to give a full rein to a loose tongue in a public place." "Our mothers teach us so, Lennox, as soon as we leave our birch bark cradles." Willet had raised his hand in warning, but he saw that it was too late. The young blood in the veins of both Tayoga and Robert was hot, and the Iroquois was stirred not less deeply than the white man. "The sachems tell us," he said, "that sometimes a man speaks foolish words because he is born foolish, again he says them at times because his temper or drink makes him foolish, or he may say them because it is his wish to be foolish and he has cultivated foolish ways all his life. This last class is the worst of all, Lennox, my friend, but there is a certain number of them in all lands, as one finds when one travels." The Onondaga spoke with great clearness and precision in his measured school French and a moment of dead silence followed. Then Robert said: "It is true, Tayoga. The chiefs of the Hodenosaunee are great and wise men. They have lived and seen much, and seeing they have remembered. They know that speech was given to man in order that he might convey his thoughts to another, and not that he might make a fool of himself." An angry exclamation came from the table at which de Mezy sat, and his satellites, Nemours and Le Moyne, swept the three with looks meant to be contemptuous. Monsieur Berryer raised deprecating hands and was about to speak, but, probably seeing that both hands and words would be of no avail, moved quietly to one side. He did not like to have quarrels in his excellent Inn of the Eagle, but they were no new thing there, for the gilded youth of Quebec was hot and intemperate. "But when a man is foolish in our village," resumed Tayoga, "and the words issue from his mouth in a stream like the cackling of a jay bird, the chiefs do not send warriors to punish him, but give him into the hands of the old women, who bind him and beat him with sticks until they can beat sense back into him." "A good way, Tayoga, a most excellent way," said Robert. "People who have reached the years of maturity pay no attention to the vaporings and madness of the foolish."