Very many men had thus prayed upon the summit of the Hill of Dreams in the days gone by. Its top was strewn with offerings. It was a sacred place. Sometimes the stone cairns did not withstand the wolves, but none the less the place was consecrate. Hither they bore the great dead. It was upon the Hill of Dreams that his people buried White Calf, the last great leader of the Plains tribes, who fell in the combat with the not less savage giant who came with the white men to hunt in the country near the Hill of Dreams. Since that time the power of the Plains tribes had waned, and they had scattered and passed away. The swarming white men--Visigoths, Vandals--had found out this spot for centuries held mysteriously dear to the first peoples of that country. They tore open the graves, scattered the childlike emblems, picked to pieces the little packages of furs and claws, jibing at the "medicine" which in its time had meant so much to the man who had left it there. The Visigoths and Vandals laughed and smote upon their thighs as they thus destroyed the feeble records of a faith gone by. Yet with what more enduring and with how dissimilar a faith did they replace that at which they mocked? White but parallels red. Our ways depart not widely from the ways of those whom we supplanted, our religion is little more than theirs, our tokens of faith but little different from theirs. We still wonder, we still beseech, we still grope, and continually we implore. On the eminences of our lives the solitary still keep vigil. In the air about us there still are Voices as of old, there still are visions wistfully besought. Now, as then, dwarfed, blighted, wandering humanity prays, lifting up its hands to something above its narrow, circumscribing world. Now, as then, the answer is sometimes given to a few for all. Now, as then, the solemn front of the Hill of Dreams still rises, dominating calmly the wide land, keeping watch always out over the plains for those who are to come, for that which is to be. Warden of destiny, it well might smile at any temples we may build, at any fetiches that we may offer up! Toward the Hill of Dreams Franklin journeyed, because it had been written. As he travelled over the long miles he scarcely noted the fields, the fences, the flocks and herds now clinging along the path of the iron rails. He crossed the trails of the departed buffalo and of the vanishing cattle, but his mind looked only forward, and he saw these records of the past but dimly. There, on the Hill of Dreams, he knew, there was answer for him if he sufficiently besought; that answer not yet learned in all the varying days. It seemed sure to him that he should have a sign.[*]