One day in the early autumn Keith's mother dressed him with unusual care and kissed him several times before they left the house. Granny had to be kissed, too, and even Lena came forward to shake hands and say good-bye. It was a very solemn affair.

Hand in hand Keith and his mother walked clear across the old City, past Great Church, until they came to a very broad lane at the foot of which was a square with a statue in it. At the other end of the square lay a very large, red building.

"That's the House of Knights where all the nobility hang up their coats-of-arms," said the mother.

But Keith was too excited to ask any questions at that moment.

They entered a house much finer and neater than their own and stopped in front of a door on the second floor. A hubbub of shrill voices could be heard from within. Keith gripped his mother's hand more firmly.

Then the door was opened by a white-haired lady with spectacles and they were admitted to a large room, containing a score of little boys and girls. A dead silence fell on the room as they appeared, and every eye turned toward Keith, who blushed furiously as was his wont whenever he found himself observed.

After a brief talk with the teacher, Keith's mother to him:

"This is Aunt Westergren, whom you must obey as you obey me. And now be a good boy and don't cry."

As the mother tarried by the door for a moment to exchange a last word with the teacher, and perhaps also to cast one more lingering glance at the boy, a little girl ran up to Keith, put her right fore-finger on top of his head and cried out:

"Towhead!"

All the other children giggled. Keith blushed more deeply than ever, but did not say a word or stir a limb. A moment later the teacher began to cross-question him about his knowledge of letters and spelling, and he found it much easier to answer her than to face the children. But, of course, after a while he was quite at home among them without knowing how it had happened.

That afternoon his mother came for him. The next morning he had to start out alone under direct orders from the father, and alone he made his way home again, his bosom swelling with a sense of wonderful independence. Years passed before he learned that his mother had watched over him for days before she was fully convinced of his ability to find the way by himself.

The autumn passed. Winter and spring came and went. It was summer again. The little school closed. Keith could read the head-lines at the tops of the pages in the big Bible without help. But of the school where he had learned it hardly a memory remained. It was as if the place had made no impression whatsoever on his mind. And the children with whom he studied and played nearly a whole year might as well have been dreams, forgotten at the moment of waking--all but one of them.

Harald alone seemed a real, living thing, a part of Keith's own life, but not a part of the school where the two met daily. He was a year older than Keith, a little slow mentally, but rather unusually advanced in other ways. His father was a merchant of some sort, with an office of his own and half a dozen clerks at his command, and Harald had been taught to regard himself as a young gentleman. They lived a few houses from the school, in the same street, and their home was a revelation to Keith.

Houses less fortunate than his own were familiar to him, but he had never seen a better one until he was asked to visit Harald for the first time, and the comparisons made on that occasion stuck deeply in his mind.

They entered through a hallway where caps and coats were left behind, and from there they went into a room where every piece of furniture was of mahogany. Between the windows hung a mirror in a gilded frame that was as tall as the room itself, so that Keith could see himself from head to foot. The object that caught the boy's attention most of all, however, was a chandelier suspended from the middle of the ceiling and made up of hundreds of little rods of glass. As Harald slammed the door on entering, some of the rods were set in motion and struck against each other with a tiny twinkle that seemed to Keith the most beautiful sound he had ever heard.

That room, Harald said, was used only to receive visitors, and he gave Keith to understand that there were any number of other rooms on both sides of it. One of these was Harald's own and used by nobody else. He could even lock the door of it on the inside, if he wanted. There they played with tin soldiers several inches high, and Harald had a little cannon out of which they could shoot dry peas, so that it was possible to fight a real battle by dividing the soldiers and taking turns of using the cannon. Finally Harald's mother appeared with a bowl of fruit and greeted the visitor with a certain searching kindness that made him a little uneasy in the midst of all his enjoyment.

Keith returned home that day much later than unusual to find his mother in a state of frantic worry. At first she declared that he must not go anywhere without her knowing about it in advance, but after a while she became quite interested and palpably elated by Keith's tale of all the glories he had seen. She explained that the glass rods on the chandeliers were prisms that showed the whole rainbow when you held them in front of a light, and she asked him eagerly if he had been invited to come again. But when the father heard of it that night, he said:

"I don't think Keith should go there at all. He can't ask such a boy over here, and the next thing we know, Keith's own home will no longer be good enough for him."

Keith could hardly believe his ears. He had never felt such resentment against his father, and just before going to bed, while his father was out of the room for a moment, he whispered to his mother:

"I think papa does not want me to have any fun!"

"You don't understand," she retorted. "He means well. Remember what Granny says: Equals make the best playmates."

Three or four times Keith went home with Harald. Then the gates of paradise were suddenly slammed in his face. One day, as they were leaving school together, Harald remarked quite calmly:

"You can't come home with me any more."

"Why," gasped Keith, his throat choking.

"Because mamma says I must find some one else to play with," Harald explained. Then he softened a little: "I can't help it, and I like you."

"But why," insisted Keith on the verge of tears.

"You look like a nice boy, mamma says, but your father is nothing but a vaktmästare, and mine is a grosshandlare (wholesale dealer)."

Keith walked home in a stupor and began to cry the moment he saw his mother. Her lips tightened and her face grew white as she listened to the story he sobbed forth.

"Now you can see that your father was right," she said at last. "Of course, we are just as good as anybody else, but others don't think so--because we are poor. But we have our pride, and you had better stay and play with your own soldiers hereafter. Then I don't have to worry about you either."

But Keith had very little pride. He continued to seek Harald's company as before, and twice, as they about to part in front of the latter's house, Keith asked if he couldn't come up and play for a little while.

"Don't you understand," Harald asked the second time, "that my mamma does not think you good enough for me to play with?"

Keith had not thought of it in that way. He had learned that there were people who looked down on his parents, just as they, in their turn, looked down on the parents of Johan, but the idea that he himself might be regarded equally inferior was entirely new to him. It was so strange to him that it took him years to grasp it. And when it came into his mind, he felt as if some one had raised a heavy stick to strike him, and he cowered under the impending blow.

Christmas was approaching.

The days grew shorter and shorter, until at last a scant four hours of daylight remained around noon. Even then a lamp was often needed for reading.

The lead-coloured sky nearly touched the roofs. The drizzle that filled the air most of the time seemed to enter men's minds, too, sapping their vigour until life became a burden. Meeting on the streets, they would cry in irritable tones:

"When will the snow come?"

It was always a tedious time for Keith. The incident with Harald made it worse this year. Except for the daily attendance at school, he was virtually a prisoner. Johan was to be seen only from the window, whence Keith enviously watched him prowling about the lane, his hands buried in the side-pockets of an old coat much too long--apparently inherited from someone else--and his shoulders hunched as if fore-destined to support loads of wood like those his father used to carry. If no one was in the living-room, Keith might shout a greeting to his playmate below, but it was not much fun, and Johan had a contemptuous way of asking why he did not come out and play.

Yet the season was not without its compensations. Stores of every kind were laid in to last through the winter. One might have thought that a severance of communications with the outside world was feared. Keith marvelled at the magnificence of it, and once in a while he asked why it had to be done. The answers were unsatisfactory. The main reason was that it had always been done, but he gathered also that, while it was perfectly respectable to live from day to day during the summer, to do so during the winter would be a distinct proof of social and economic inferiority.

The fire wood came first--a mighty load of birch logs piled along the house front in the lane. Two men were busy all day with saw and ax, reducing those logs into pieces matching the fire-places in the kitchen stove and the two glazed brick ovens in the living-room and the parlour. Two more men piled the pieces into huge sacks and staggered with those on their backs up the five flights of stairs to the top garret under the peak of the house, which belonged to the Wellanders.

Keith would stand in the kitchen door watching them. First he heard the slow clamp-clamp of ascending foot-steps. Then the man's heavy breathing became audible, and Keith felt as if the load was resting on his own shoulders. Finally the open top of the bag, with its bright stuffing of newly cut birch wood, showed at the corner of the landing quite a long time before the head beneath it came into sight. As the man crossed the landing in front of Keith, bent almost double under his burden, a dew of pungent perspiration would drop on the slate-coloured stones, leaving behind a curious path of round spots. Not a word was said at that time, but coming down the men would sometimes throw a crude jest to the bright-eyed watcher or stop to refill their mouths with snuff out of a little thin brass box with a mirror fitted to the inside of its cover. The sight of the snuff filled Keith with a sense of loathing, although his father used to put a pinch of it into his nostrils now and then, and more than anything else it seemed to mark a distinction between himself and those people from a world far beneath his own. Theirs was a racking job, heavier than any other known to the boy, and one day he asked his mother:

"Why do they care to carry all that wood for us?"

"Because we pay them, and because they are mighty glad to get the money. Otherwise they couldn't live."

"And where does the wood come from?"

"The bank sends it as part of papa's pay."

Once more Keith was so impressed with the miraculous power of that mysterious being which his father served and cursed and worshipped that his mother's previous answer was lost for the time being. But it recurred to his mind later and connected with his father's talk of making him a carpenter. A strong prejudice against manual labour was shaping itself in his mind.

After the wood came the victuals: a tub of butter reaching Keith to the chin; bags of flour; barrels of potatoes and apples; hams and haunches of dried mutton and smoked reindeer meat; and lastly packages of smaller size and sundry contents that the mother promptly carried to the pantry inside the parlour without letting Keith touch them.

This year--it was the winter following the Franco-Prussian war--the preparations were rendered uncommonly impressive by the addition of a cheese large as the moon at full. There was always plenty of cheese of various kinds in the house: whole milk cheese carefully aged until its flavour was like that of English Stilton or Italian Gorgonzola; skim milk cheese stuffed with cloves and cardamom seeds; and dark brown goat milk cheese of a cloying sweetness that Keith detested.

Cheese was more than a taste with Keith's father. It was a hobby, and one of his few pastimes was to skirmish in strange little shops for some particularly old and strong-smelling piece at a reasonable price. When he brought home a bargain of that kind, he acted like a bibliophile having just captured a rare first edition for a song, and the mother tried hard to share his enthusiasm. But, she said once, she had to draw the line at cheese that walked by itself. Half in jest and half in earnest, the father maintained that the maggots were the very essence of the cheese, and that to remove them was to lose the finest flavour. This year the father had bought a whole fresh cheese in order to age it at home and thus save money in two ways, the price being proportionate to the age.

The same large-handed system prevailed in other things, though the parents often spoke of their poverty, and though their resources undoubtedly were very limited. Shirts, table-ware, bed-linen, china, etc., must needs be acquired in round numbers. To have less than a dozen of anything was to have nothing at all. The breaking of a cup was a family disaster if it could not be replaced. Everything had to be in sets, and to preserve these intact, the utmost care was preached and exercised. It bred thrift and orderliness, but also an undue regard for property.

Finally came the time for baking and other direct preparations for a holiday season that in the good old days used to last from Christmas Eve to January 13th known as the Twentieth Christmas Day, when everybody "danced the Yule out." What interested Keith most in this part of the proceedings was the making of gingersnaps according to a recipe transmitted to his mother from bygone generations and cherished by her as a precious family secret. A whole day was set aside for the purpose and at the end of it they had a big, bulging earthen jar filled to the brim. Keith used to boast to other children of those dainties that, in addition to their taste, had the fascination of many different shapes--hearts, crowns, lilies, clubs, diamonds, baskets, and so on. They really deserved all the praise they got, and he had so little to boast of on the whole. The jar stood on the floor in the pantry back of the parlour, and once in a while Keith found his way to it without maternal permission, although, as a rule, he was little given to lawbreaking.

One morning three or four days before Christmas Lena was heard calling from the kitchen:

"Keith, Keith, come and look!"

Eager as always when the slightest excitement was promised, the boy started so suddenly that his little table was upset with its whole population of tin soldiers and his mother was moved to remark that "it was no use behaving as if the house were on fire."

"Look at the snow," said Lena, pointing to the window when Keith reached the kitchen, relieved at not having had to pick up the spilled toys before he could go.

Huge, wet, feathery flakes were dropping lazily from the sky. Little by little they increased in numbers and fell more quickly. At last they formed a moving veil through which the building at the other end of the courtyard could barely be seen.

Later in the day Keith was permitted to look out through one of the front windows. The whole world had changed and looked much brighter in spite of the failing light. The Quay was covered by a carpet of white that made the waters beyond look doubly dark and cold. The trees on the opposite shore looked as if they had been painted from the topmost twig to the root. Down in the lane, two of the workers in the distillery were pelting each other with snowballs while a third one was shouting at the top of his voice:

"We'll have a white Christmas this year, thank heaven."

That same evening Keith's long cherished dream of visiting the open-air Christmas Fair at Great Square was to come true at last. Like other affairs of its kind, it had been reduced by the modern shop to a mere shadow of its former glorious self, and it was kept up only out of regard for ancient tradition. Keith had been told that it was nothing but a lot of open booths displaying cheap toys and cheaper candy. To Keith toys were toys and candy candy, no matter what the price and quality, and so he kept on begging leave to go, until the night in question his parents, who were going out with friends, deemed it better to let him see for himself. And so Lena was ordered to take charge of the expedition.

Lena and Keith were dressed and ready to start when the mother came into the kitchen to give the boy a farewell kiss as usual. He was in high spirits, but fidgety with some unexpressed wish.

"What is it, Keith," asked the mother, recognizing the symptoms.

"I want some money," he whispered into her ear.

"Go and ask papa."

"No, you ask him."

That was what always happened, and in the end the mother voiced the boy's plea to the father, who just then appeared in the door to the living-room. He was in a good humour and promptly reached into his pocket. Unfortunately Keith discovered at that crucial moment that one of his shoe laces had become untied.

"Please, mamma, help me," he said, putting his foot on a chair to enable her to reach it more easily.

"That settles it," exclaimed the father with a darkening face as he handed Keith a few small copper coins. "That is all you will get now. A boy of five who makes his mother tie his shoe strings ought not to have anything at all."

Keith took the coins silently and went with Lena to the fair, but he saw nothing worth seeing, and he never wanted to go again. Uneasily he prowled among the booths trying as a matter of duty to find something so cheap that his scant hoard would buy it. At last he succeeded in getting a little box of tin soldiers of poorest quality for one-third less than the price put on it It was one of the few times in his life when he found himself able to haggle over the cost of a thing.

From the first he found fault with the new addition to his army, and one day not long afterwards he charged the whole regiment with cowardice in the face of the enemy. A drumhead court martial was held on the spot, and the verdict was a foregone conclusion. The culprits were found guilty in a body and sentenced to immediate execution. Then Keith possessed himself surreptitiously of the family hammer, and when his mother came to investigate the noise he was making the whole offensive regiment had been reduced to scraps. Never before or after did Keith as a general go to such extremes on behalf of military morale.

But many, many years later, when he stopped for the first time at a typical English hotel, he found himself horribly embarrassed by the assistance forced on him by the obligatory valet.

In Sweden the principal celebration with its distribution of gifts takes place late on Christmas Eve.

Long before that day Keith began to watch every package brought into the house. Soon he noticed several that disappeared quickly without having been opened. Nor did it take his shrewd little mind long to figure out that they must have been stowed away on the upper shelf of the pantry back of the parlour. This was an excellent hiding-place because the shelf in question was fully six feet above the floor and on a level with the lintel of the doorway, so that its contents seemed as much out of reach as they were out sight from below.

One day, however, Keith succeeded in getting into the parlour when both parents were out. The night before his father had come home with an unusually large and queerly shaped package under his arm and had taken it straight into the parlour. The boy's curiosity was at fever heat and got the better of his customary inertia in the face of explicit prohibitions. Having dragged a heavy wooden chair into the pantry, he placed its tall back directly against the shelves. The crosspieces in the back of the chair formed rungs on which he climbed up to the top shelf. It was quite a feat for a very small boy, but the slight timidity that characterized him as a rule was totally forgotten for the time.

There was the mystifying package together with many others. He could even touch it with his hand. In spite of its size, it was very light. It was wider at the bottom than at the top, and it sounded hollow when he knocked at it. His little brain worked at high pressure, but not a guess came out of it that was at all plausible. Finally Keith had to climb down no wiser than he was before. His failure had one advantage. It freed him from all of guilt. It served also to keep his expectations at an unusually high pitch, so that when the morning of the great day arrived at last, it seemed as if he were facing twelve long hours of actual torture.

Every one was very busy preparing not only for the feast of the evening, but for the two coming holidays. Christmas Day in Sweden being followed by a Second Christmas Day, equal to the first one in leisure if not in sanctity. No one had any time to spare for the boy, who found himself in the way wherever he turned. In the end he was ordered pointblank out of the kitchen, where his mother, Granny and the servant girl needed all the space at their disposal. The door to the parlour was closed although the lodger had left town for the holidays, and so nothing but the living-room remained. There Keith whiled away the long hours in vain speculation on the contents of the mysterious package.

He tried to recall what things he had wished for during the year. He felt sure that nothing of the kind could be in the package. Any desire openly expressed was disregarded by his father, Keith thought, if not actually resented. The reason given was that a Christmas present should be a complete surprise, and if the recipient had openly asked for it, there could be no talk of surprising him. Of course, Keith could whisper what he wanted into his mother's ear now and then but always with the provision that she must convey the proper information to the father as coming from herself.

Even this process of elimination failed, however, and so the day dragged on interminably, with no help from without for a mind weary of waiting. The customary dinner was passed up. Everybody snatched a bite off the kitchen table without breaking away from the work. Three or four times people arrived with packages from relatives or friends. Each visitor had to be treated, even though he be a stranger of the humblest character. Then dull monotony reigned once more, and Keith resumed his fidgeting back and forth between the kitchen door and his own corner. The old toys were simply unendurable....

It had long been dark when the father returned home at last, laden with parcels and tired out by personal delivery of Christmas gifts to the various members of the family. His face was slightly flushed and he talked with unusual eagerness. An atmosphere of reckless good-will surrounded him, and when he made a remark about there being no presents, even Keith knew it to be facetious.

The last hour was the longest. The father and the mother had withdrawn to the parlour and closed the door behind them. The girl was setting the table and couldn't be disturbed. Granny was nervous and irritable because she knew that she would be forced to join the rest at the table that night. Keith felt like a disembodied soul let loose in infinite space without goal or purpose.

Toward eight o'clock the parlour door opened and Keith was called in. A tiny Christmas tree stood on a table in a corner, glistening with lights and multicoloured paper festoons. It represented a great concession, because neither one of the parents cared much for the trouble involved. If there had been a number of children in the family, they said, then it would have been another matter. The truth was that Keith didn't care very much either. He clapped hands and shouted excitedly, of course, but his glances went sideways to the big sofa, where stood a huge hamper piled to twice its own height with parcels, all wrapped in snow-white paper and sealed with red sealing wax. The air of the room was charged with the rich smell of newly melted wax, and to Keith that smell was always the essence of Christmas, its chief symbol and harbinger.

During those few minutes in the parlour a dozen tall candles had been lighted in the living-room, transforming the place that a moment before seemed so dreary. The dining table was opened to its full length and placed across the middle of the room, at right angles to the chaiselongue where Keith slept nights. Cut glass dishes and silver-ware shone in the light reflected from the spotlessly white table cloth. In the centre stood the Christmas layer cake, its body four inches thick and its top glistening with red and yellow and green pieces of candied fruit.

Then began the little comedy regularly enacted every Christmas.

"Isn't Granny coming," the father asked. Then he turned to Lena. "Tell her we are ready."

"She says she doesn't want to come in," Lena reported after a hasty visit to the kitchen.

"You go and ask her for me, Keith," was the father's next suggestion.

"Thank you, dear," Granny said when Keith came to her with his message. "But you tell your father that I think the kitchen is a much better place for a useless old hag like myself."

"Suppose you go," the father said to his wife on hearing Keith's modified version of Granny's reply.

"She says she really won't come in," the mother explained a minute later. "You had better go out and ask her yourself, Carl. It is the one thing she cannot resist."

The father went with a broad grin on his face. Keith laughed loudly and nervously, his eyes on the huge cake. But the mother said apologetically to Lena:

"Mamma is so funny about coming in here, although she knows how much we want her."

"Here she is now," said Lena.

And the father appeared with Granny on his arm, and Granny was all dressed up in her best skirt of black silk thick as cloth, with a cap of black lace on her head.

"Really, I can't see what you want with an old thing like me in here," she continued protesting as she was being led to her seat beside Keith. The girl sat opposite Granny, and the mother beside the girl, facing Keith. The father, on that one occasion, always occupied the chaiselongue at the short end of the table, with the mother on his right and Keith on his left. Beside him stood the hamper with its mountainous pile of parcels.

Keith said grace with folded hands and bent head, and, of course, he had to say it twice because the first time he swallowed half the words in his eagerness to get through quickly. Then the meal began.

It opened with a light smörgasbord, hors d'oeuvres, literally rendered sandwich-table: caviar, anchovy, sardines, shavings of smoked salmon, slices of bologna, and so on. With it the father took a snaps of Swedish gin or brännvin, and after much pressing Granny consented to take one, too. The main course consisted of lutfisk: dried and salted codfish that had been soaked in water for twenty-four hours to take out the salt and then boiled until it was tender as cranberry jelly. It was served with boiled potatoes and a gravy made of cream and chopped hard-boiled eggs. It was followed by risgrynsgröt: rice cooked in milk and served with a cover of sugar and cinnamon. Wherever Swedes go, they must have those two dishes on Christmas Eve. They have had them since the days when Christmas was a pagan celebration of the winter solstice, when dried codfish was the staple winter food, and when rice was the rarest of imported delicacies.

Keith did not become interested until the rice appeared and the father declared that no one could taste it until he or she had "rhymed over the rice." Lena had to begin, and blushingly she read:

"To cook rice is a great feat, especially to get it sweet."

Whereupon everybody applauded, and the mother followed:

"Those who don't like rice are worse than little mice."

The father made them all laugh by saying:

"The rice is sweet and looks very neat, but now I want to eat."

The cutting of the cake, with its coating of sugar and its many layers of custard ... the wine, port and sherry, poured from tall glass decanters with silver labels hung about their necks to show which was which ... the blushing native apples and the figs from distant sunlit shores ... the almonds and raisins that tested best when eaten together ... the candy and the caramels ... the absence of restraint and reproof ... the freedom to indulge one's utmost appetite ... the smiles and the pleasant words and the jokes sprung by the father ... and in the midst of it all a pause laden with rose-coloured melancholy....

"Why can it not be Christmas every day," asked Keith suddenly.

"Because Christmas then would be like any other day," the father replied, reaching for the first parcel which was always for Keith.

One by one they were handed out. Each one was elaborately addressed and furnished with a rhymed or unrhymed tag that often hid a sting beneath its clownish exterior. The father read the inscription aloud before he handed each parcel to its recipient, who had to open it and let its contents be admired by all before another gift was distributed.

The table became crowded. The floor was a litter of paper. Lena giggled. Granny's cap was down on one ear. Keith could not sit still on his chair.

"To Master Keith Wellander," the father read out. "A friendly warning, to be remembered in the morning and all through the day. He who slops at meals is a pig that squeals and hurts his parents alway."

Keith took the parcel with less than usual zest. It was rectangular and very heavy. For a moment he hesitated to open it. There was something about its inscription that puzzled and bothered him.

At last the wrapper came off, and he gazed uncomprehendingly at a large piece of wood hollowed out like a canoe.

"A boat ..." he stammered.

"A trough," rejoined his father, a strange, almost embarrassed look appearing on his face. "This is Christmas and I want you to be happy, but you must learn to eat decently, and I thought this might serve you as a lesson and a reminder."

Keith said nothing. He sat looking at that piece of wood as if it were a dragon that had swallowed the whole Christmas in a single gulp. He wanted to cry, but for the first time he seemed to feel a pride that forbade him to do so....

"Master Keith Wellander," the father read out again with evident haste and in a voice which he tried to make very jolly, "When beaten in the open field, this will be my trusty shield."

It was the package--and the trough was forgotten.

The boy trembled with excitement. His hands tore vainly at the paper cover, which, in the end, had to be removed by the father.

On the table, fully revealed at last, stood a real fortress of cardboard, with a drawbridge that could be raised, and a tower in the centre, and at the top of it a flagstaff flying the Swedish colours.

It was his heart's most cherished desire, the thing that had seemed so unattainable that he had deemed it useless to whisper it into his mother's ear.

For a long while he did not move at all, but just looked and looked, seemingly afraid to touch the new toy. Then a warm flood of joy shot through him, and suddenly he was seized by an irresistible impulse to kiss his father--which was a most unusual endearment between them. As he put his hand on the table to get off the chair, it touched the trough, and once more his mood changed. He seemed to stiffen, and all he could do was to hold out his hand and whisper:

"Thank you very much, papa!"

On Christmas Day morning everybody rose while it was still pitch dark outside. After a hasty cup of coffee, the parents and Keith set off for Great Church to attend julotta--yule matins--an early service held only that one day of the year.

More snow had fallen, and now it was freezing, so that every step they took produced a peculiar, almost metallic crunching. From every quarter silent crowds in their holiday best streamed toward the old church. They seemed very solemn, but Keith sensed the happy spirit underlying their outward sedateness. It filled him with a wild desire to romp, and it was merely the awe of his father's presence that kept him in check.

The church was packed, but they found good seats. Keith had eyes for one thing only: the Star of Bethlehem that blazed above the screen of darkly green spruces surrounding the altar. All the rest of it was lost on him.

Then the organ music burst forth, and for a moment he cowered as under a blow. It was too much of a novelty, and the vibrations touched his supersensitive nerves annoyingly. After a while he grew more accustomed to it, but he did not like it, and he said so loudly enough to bring him a stern glance from his father and smiles from some of the people in the pew ahead. During the brief sermon he slept peacefully.

As soon as they were home again, the fortress was brought out and preparations made for a great siege. In the midst of it he left his corner to put a question to the mother, who was dozing over a book in her easy chair.

"How could papa know that I wanted it," he asked, and she knew what he was thinking of.

"Don't you remember," she answered smiling slyly, "how you came home one day last summer and talked about something you had seen in a window on West Long Street, and papa was listening."

"So long ago," mused Keith, "and I didn't know he heard it."

"Oh, yes, he heard, and he remembered. You don't understand papa. He doesn't want you to ask for things because he finds it such a pleasure to figure out what you want and give it to you unexpectedly."

Keith returned to his corner thinking hard, as was his wont at times. The siege was postponed. He took out the trough and studied it carefully. It would make a good boat. Then he put it down and sat for a while looking at the little fortress--so like the one he could see when he looked out of their front windows. His heart swelled, and with a rush that nearly upset his little table, he made for his father in the parlour, crawled up on his lap, put both arms about his neck, and kissed him. And to his surprise he was not repelled. But a moment later his father put him down on the floor and said in a voice that sounded a little choked:

"Go back and play with your soldiers now."

Then came dinner, always the same on Christmas Day: smörgasbord; roasted fresh ham with mashed potatoes and tiny cubes of Swedish turnips fried in butter; rice and milk; cake and wine.

And the day ended as it had begun, happily and peacefully. Never had the boy felt more warmly toward his father. But at dinner the next day, which was also a holiday so that the father was at home, Keith happened to spill something on the table cloth.

"Remember your Christmas present," said the father sharply. "You are old enough to behave properly at table, and if you won't, we shall let you eat in your own corner and eat out of the trough."

During the rest of that day Keith could not play with his fortress. Once he took the trough to the window that happened to be open and contemplated the possibility of dropping it into the lane. But his courage failed him.

It stayed with him as part of his little stock of toys, and gradually it came to be viewed with a certain amount of indifference. But on the rare occasions when he was permitted to have a playmate at home, he always managed to hide the trough under his mother's bureau. And even the mere consciousness of its presence there would sometimes set his cheeks burning.

It was summer again. The school was closed. Keith's pleas to be allowed to play with Johan became impassioned. Consequently his parents were pleased when Aunt Brita asked if Keith could spend a few weeks with them in a little cottage they had hired on an island halfway between Stockholm and the open sea.

To Keith this was a tremendous adventure--his first excursion from home, and almost his first acquaintance with real country life. In fact, the impressions of the journey itself were so many and so novel that his mind couldn't retain anything at all. The same thing happened over and over again during the earlier part of his life, so that out of that epoch-making summer visit, for instance, only a single slight incident took up a lasting abode in his memory.

The cottage stood in the middle of the island, which was so small that a fifteen-minute walk took them down to the nearest shore. Thither they went one afternoon not long after his arrival to bathe--his aunt, his cousin Carl who was a year younger than himself, Keith, a couple of other children of the same age, and Mina, an eighteen-year old girl living with Keith's uncle and aunt in a position halfway between ward and servant. Across the fields and along shaded wood paths they ran joyously to a sheltered bay with a sandy beach from which the open fjord could be seen in the distance. The children stripped helter-skelter and went into the shallow water as nature had made them, but Mina, who was to assist them, had for want of bathing suit put on a starched white petticoat. The upper part of her body was bare, showing two beautifully pointed breasts.

Keith looked and looked at those breasts until Mina noticed him and actually began to blush. As if embarrassed, she picked up one of the other children and began to swing it around in a circle. Her movement turned Keith's attention to the petticoat, and suddenly he could think of nothing else.

The children were naked. Why should Mina wear a piece of clothing that even Keith could see was quite unfitted for such a use. There must be something to hide. What could it be? At last he could contain himself no longer, but blurted out:

"Why does Mina wear that silly skirt?"

"Because she is afraid of catching cold," replied his aunt from the shore with a slight jeer in her voice and one of her shrewd smiles.

"Why shouldn't we catch cold, too," was his next question.

There was no direct answer, but he could hear his aunt mutter between her teeth:

"Drat that boy!"

Then she burst into open laughter, while Mina rushed ashore and hastily began to dress behind a close screen of undergrowth.

After that Mina did not go in bathing with the children.

Many years later Keith could still visualize the whole scene as if it had happened only a few days ago, while all his efforts to recall the cottage where they lived, or anything else seen that summer, were vain.

In the autumn of that year Keith was sent to a "real" school, selected after much inquiry by his parents as combining a reasonable degree of efficiency and social standing with an equally reasonable cost of tuition. It was private like the first one, kept by two middle-aged spinster sisters, one of whom was tall, angular and firm, while the other was short, fat and sentimental. It held about two scores of pupils, most of whom were girls. These girls ranged in years to the near-marriageable age, while none of the boys was more than eight years old. Thus the atmosphere was distinctly feminine, which in the eyes of Keith's mother marked an added advantage.

The only thing that excited Keith about the new school was that it took him farther from home than he had ever been allowed to wander unattended before, into a hitherto unexplored region of the city known as the South End. It was a poor man's neighbourhood on the whole, but of that Keith knew nothing at the time. The school occupied a few large and sunny rooms in the rear part of a sprawling old stone structure built like a palace around an enormous cobble-stoned courtyard, with a tall arched gateway providing entrance from the street under the front part of the house. For a while it was quite impressive and a little disturbing, but like everything else it soon became familiar and commonplace.

To get there from his own part of town, Keith had to cross the Sluice--a lock enabling vessels to pass safely from Lake Maelaren to the salt waters of the Bay in spite of the frequently sharp difference of level. At either end of the lock was a drawbridge in two sections raised from the centre to let the larger vessels through. The place was full of interesting sights, and Keith loved in particular to press right up against the edge of the raised bridge as some steamer or small sailing vessel glided leisurely in or out of the ever shifting waters of the lock.

At first it never occurred to him that he might walk around by the other bridge when the one right in his way happened to be open, and so he was late at school several times in quick succession. The first time he was warned. The second he was placed in a corner of the room with his face to the wall and kept there for about one quarter of an hour. The third time the elder Miss Ahlberg applied a ruler to the finger-tips of his left hand, which she held in a firm grasp within one of her own.

The physical sensation gave the boy a terrible shock. No one had ever really hurt him before. The spankings administered at home once in a very great while were like thunderstorms, with a great deal of noise and small harm done. This was something else, and more intimidating than the pain was the manifest intention of the teacher to inflict it. Her face was tense and her eyes flashed fire. Worst of all, however, was the shame of it, for the punishment was applied in front of the whole school.

When Keith retired to his own seat sobbing bitterly, he felt that he could never look the other children in the face, and that they probably would shun him as a pariah. The only thing would be to tell his mother that he could not go back to school again. He was still shaking with sobs, when he heard a boy on the chair behind him whisper into his ear:

"Oh, that's nothing. You just wait till she pulls your hair. She pulls it right out by the roots. I'll show you a bare spot on my head during the next pause."

And so he did when the lesson came to an end and they were permitted to play for a few minutes. Other children joined them, and no one seemed to think less of Keith for what had happened to him. It was a revelation to him and opened vistas of considerable interest. But the memory of the physical and mental shock received was more powerful, and after that he took care to reach school in time regardless of what might be the temptations along his path or the effort it might cost him to get there.

In fact, the incident became to some extent determining for his whole career in school. He never voluntarily did anything that might expose him to punishment, and rarely was he able to forget himself to the extent of incurring reproof. He turned out a docile pupil, and on the whole, docility did not come hard to him. In spite of the vitality with which he overflowed, there was a certain timidity attaching to him.