“It is, indeed, Peter; and if you will get down on your knees, and humble your thoughts, and pray to God to strengthen you in these good feelings, he will be sure to do it, and make you, altogether, a new man.”

Peter looked wistfully at Margery, and then turned his eyes toward the earth.  After sitting in a thoughtful mood for some time, he again regarded his companion, saying, with the simplicity of a child: 

“Don’t know how to do dat, Blossom.  Hear medicine-priest of pale-faces pray, sometime, but poor Injin don’t know enough to speak to Great Spirit.  You speak to Great Spirit for him.  He know your voice, Blossom, and listen to what you say; but he won’t hear Peter, who has so long hated his enemy.  P’raps he angry if he hear Peter speak.”

“In that you are mistaken, Peter.  The ears of the Lord are ever open to our prayers, when put up in sincerity, as I feel certain that yours will now be.  But, after I have told you the meaning of what I am about to say, I will pray with you and for you.  It is best that you should begin to do this, as soon as you can.”

Margery then slowly repeated to Peter the words of the Lord’s prayer.  She gave him its history, and explained the meaning of several of its words that might otherwise have been unintelligible to him, notwithstanding his tolerable proficiency in English—­a proficiency that had greatly increased in the last few weeks, in consequence of his constant communications with those who spoke it habitually.  The word “trespasses,” in particular, was somewhat difficult for the Indian to comprehend, but Margery persevered until she succeeded in giving her scholar tolerably accurate ideas of the meaning of each term.  Then she told the Indian to kneel with her, and, for the first time in his life, that man of the Openings and prairies lifted his voice in prayer to the one God.  It is true that Peter had often before mentally asked favors of his Manitou; but the requests were altogether of a worldly character, and the being addressed was invested with attributes very different from those which he now understood to belong to the Lord of heaven and earth.  Nor was the spirit in asking at all the same.  We do not wish to be understood as saying that this Indian was already a full convert to Christianity, which contains many doctrines of which he had not the most distant idea; but his heart had undergone the first step in the great change of conversion, and he was now as humble as he had once been proud; as meek, as he had formerly been fierce; and he felt that certain proof of an incipient love of the Creator, in a similar feeling toward all the works of his hands.