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 contrition for the sinfulness of his course, but in grief for the pitiful plight to which it has brought him. Being the tears of self-pity, and not of repentance, they are not the kind to divert us from our fixed purpose--that purpose, our highest duty." Soft Voice. "But, then, he is so young yet!" Stern Voice. "But, then, he is so bad already!" Soft Voice. "But, bethink you, how much it lacks of being wholly his own fault? Indeed, he is scarcely at all responsible for being what he is, and it seems hard that he should be made to suffer for the folly of others."