Now No-tongue was prompted to leave the village in which he had spent many years. For a long time he had been talking of the distant home from which he had come with his mother, when he was a very young man. At that time he wanted to see the world, and he had drifted from village to village along the whole coast line until finally he had settled down with his wife. The memory of his old home had never left him, and he longed to go back and see his relatives and the scenes of his childhood. The quarrel with Ikeraping strengthened his decision to leave this year, despite the ties which held him to the village where his children were born and were growing up.