im, the little castaway was dropping off to sleep, when that
voice, so like his mother's, which he had heard on the hill at twilight,
came again to his ear, repeating the same words: "You have but too much
need of rest! Then, sleep, poor child, sleep!"

CHAPTER XIV.

The Manitou Voices.

It was the hour when good boys, with cheerful hearts and innocent
thoughts, are wont to rise to the cheerful duties and innocent pleasures
of the day, that Sprigg was awakened from a sweet dream of home by a
voice close beside him, which came to him like his mother's gentle
morning call. He opened his eyes, but could see nothing, save a dense,
red mist, bright and luminous, yet as impenetrable to sight as the
blackest darkness. But when, on reaching out his hand, he had felt the
moss and grass of the bed he lay on, and the hairy coats of the bears he
lay with, then knew he but too well that his sweet thoughts of home--his
mother's gentle morning call, his father's jolly laugh, and Pow-wow's
loud, heroic bark--were all an empty dream. And yet, hardly more assured
was he that what his senses were insisting on telling him were not
things just as empty and unsubstantial.

What the voice was saying when it woke him, the boy could not recall,
but it left a feeling in his heart as if pitying tenderness had been the
burden of the words it had spoken. Tones were still lingering in his
ear, and with effect so soothing that he should probably have fallen
asleep again; but in answer to it he heard another voice, so abrupt and
stern that he started up wide awake, and, in an instant, was all
attention. What passed between the invisible speakers, whom we shall
distinguish as the "Stern Voice" and the "Soft Voice," ran, word for
word, as follows:

Stern Voice. "He must run the Manitou race."

Soft Voice. "Is that terrible ordeal his only chance?"

Stern Voice. "It is. Though so young, his heart is already so proud and
deceitful and hard that we must all but break it, to bring it to the
good for which it is destined, and of which it is capable."

Soft Voice. "But he can hardly as yet have strayed so far from good as
to need so severe an experience for bringing him back. There were tears
on his face last night when he fell asleep--soft, sweet tears--and there
are fresh ones upon it now. May not these plead for him?"

Stern Voice. "True, there is something of human affection in these
tears. But apart from this, they are shed, not in cont