Bear, which nightly prowls through the
vast abysses of the polar sky.

When the boy turned his gaze from the great constellation which hung in
the dark wilderness overhead, he saw that he was alone again. While he
yet wondered in great awe at what he had seen and heard, he felt himself
float like a mist and become like a cloud, rise beyond the brows of the
hills, and ascend the invisible stairways of the sky....

It seemed to him thereafter that a swoon came over him, in which he
passed beyond the far-off blazing fires of strange stars. At last,
suddenly, he stood on the verge of _Arth_, _Arth Uthyr_, the Great Bear.
There he saw, with the vision of immortal, not of mortal, eyes, a
company of most noble and majestic figures seated at what he thought a
circular abyss, but which had the semblance of a vast table. Each of
these seven great knights or lordly kings had a star upon his forehead,
and these were stars of the mighty constellation of the Bear which the
boy had seen night after night from his home among the mountains by the
sea.

It was with a burning throb at his heart that he recognized in the King
of all these kings no other than himself.

While he looked, in amazement so great that he could hear the pulse of
his heart, as in the silence of a wood one hears the tapping of a
woodpecker, he saw this mighty phantom self rise till he stood towering
over all there, and heard a voice as though an ocean rose and fell
through the eternal silences.

"Comrades in God," it said, "the time is come when that which is great
shall become small."

And when the voice was ended, the mighty figure faded in the blue
darkness, and only a great star shone where the uplifted dragon helm had
brushed the roof of heaven. One by one the white lords of the sky
followed in his mysterious way, till once more were to be seen only the
stars of the Bear.

The boy dreamed that he fell as a falling meteor, and that he floated
over land and sea as a cloud, and then that he sank as mist upon the
hills of his own land.

A noise of wind stirred in his ears. He rose stumblingly, and stood,
staring around him. He glanced upward and saw the stars of the Great
Bear in their slow march round the Pole.... Then he remembered.

He went slowly down the hill, his mind heavy with thought. When he was
come to his own place, lo! all the fierce chivalry of the land came out
to meet him; for the archdruid had foretold that the great King to be
had rece