Akkeewaisee, the Aged, was sleeping on his bed of skins and soft grass, when the Manitou of Dreams came to him, and led him out of the hollow cave towards the Wanare-tebe, or dwelling-place of the souls of the Dahcotahs, and their kindred tribes. Onward they travelled for many suns, over lofty mountains, up whose rocky sides they were obliged to scramble as a wild goat scrambles; now swimming deep rivers, now threading mazy forests, now frozen in the regions of intense cold, and now burnt in those of great heat, till at length they came to a very high rock, the edge of which was as sharp as the sharpest knife. Waiting, at its hither end, their turn to essay the dangerous test of their good or bad deeds, the unerring trial of their guilt or purity, stood many souls of Dahcotahs, and others whom Akkeewaisee had known on the earth. He stood and beheld the punishment of the bad, and the blessed escape of the good from the dreadful ordeal to which all alike were subjected. He saw a Dahcotah attempt the dangerous passage who had been too lazy to hunt, who had lain whole days stretched out upon his mat, while his wife begged food of the husbands of other women, and his children were clothed with skins, the produce of the labours of other men. He saw him precipitated from the dizzy height into the depths below, where the Evil Spirit received him into ids arms, and condemned him to that--to the criminal--hardest of punishments, a life of labour and fatigue. The great stick of wood was placed upon his shoulders, and a great pail of water in each hand, while the evil creature appointed to be his task-master flogged him incessantly to incite to a quicker walk. Again was the passage attempted by another. A Dahcotah came forward, who had dared to paint his cheeks as a warrior paints, and to shave his crown to the scalp-lock, and to prepare a sheaf of arrows, and to strike the painted pole, that stood by the council fire, and to dance the war-dance, and to utter the whoop of a warrior. Yet, when he came to the field where the hostile Tetons were assembled to do battle with his tribe--when his brothers had rushed like men upon their foes--he wiped the paint from his cheeks, he cut off the scalp-lock, he threw away his sheaf of arrows, he forgot that he had struck the war-pole, or danced, or whooped, and fled from the field as a deer flies from the bark of a dog. Him the master of the fetes of the bad ordained to a ceaseless warfare with the shades of the Tetons, from whom he had fled. He saw a liar attempt the dreadful passage--he fared no better than those who had preceded him; a reviler of the priests, and disbeliever in their power, met with the same fate. He saw the son of the aged Tadeus-kund, who had beaten his mother and spat in the face of his father, double chained to a wheel which moved over the floor of the abyss, at the top of the speed of the unnatural son.