amend them. Now, how is this to be brought about? How is this case to be
treated?"

"My dear Meg, that is the very question I have been asking myself all
this time, and to find the answer I must be allowed a few hours' privacy
for thinking the matter over. So you and the children go to bed and
leave me to my reflections, and in the morning we will hold another
consultation."

So saying, the bear, with the look of one preparing himself for deep
thought, and all unconscious of what he was doing, seated himself upon
his haunches. Whereat, Manitou-Echo suddenly quitted his seat, when,
with a swift, sleek slide down his charger's back, plump to the ground
came Sprigg, still in a sitting posture, his straddled legs as nicely
adjusted to the bear's broad rump as spur to heel.

"Bless a body," cried the bear, glancing 'round at our hero, where he
sat with his face all crumpled up for a cry; not that he was hurt in the
least, but that Manitou-Echo and Will-o'-the-Wisp were laughing at him,
as he could see (for he could not hear them) by the fantastic capers of
their moccasins and by the lantern bobbing up and down. "Bless a body!
But it had quite slipped my mind that the cub was on my back. There,
now! Don't rub so hard, and save your brine for your sins."

"He-he-he!" laughed Manitou-Echo, now aloud.

"Ha-ha-ha!" laughed Will-o'-the-Wisp.

"Ho-ho-ho!" Elfin laughter resounding now from every side. The boy
looked quickly about him. To his astonishment, he found the floor of the
cave, as far as the light of the bobbing lantern allowed him to see,
alive, so to speak, with red moccasins, all dancing about on tip-toe, or
kicking gleefully into the air.

"Hush, children, hush!" cried Meg of the Hills, in a voice of gentle
remonstrance. "Do you not see how it hurts the poor boy to be laughed
at? Hush, I charge you!"

The elfin laughter ceased at once. But straight, the void thus left was
filled by a long, calf-like howl from our hero, who, now that he had
found there some one capable of understanding what a human boy could
suffer, must need give vent to his wounded feelings--laugh who would.
His lamentation had not reached the modulating point, when, from the
hollow depths around, there came, first, a big buzz, then a hoarse hum,
and then a mumbling, rumbling, grumbling sort of a noise, which striking
his ear as no empty echo, caused him to cut short his longest howl in
the middle, to listen and glance about him.

"It's on