The next Sunday morning found Keith more than usually restless. Half a dozen times in quick succession he appealed to the mother for suggestions as to what to do. Finally she turned to the father, who was preparing to go out:

"Can't you take him along, Carl? He has never seen the bank, and he really should get out a little."

For a little while the father said nothing. Then he spoke directly to Keith:

"Put on your coat and cap."

The boy who had been looking and listening with open mouth and a heart that hardly dared to beat, became wildly excited.

"Now, Keith," the father admonished, "you can't go unless you behave."

"Where's my coat, mother," asked Keith eagerly and unheedingly.

"Don't you know that yourself," growled the father. "You are a big boy already, and you should keep your own things in order."

"I have hung it up where he cannot reach it," the mother interceded. "I'll get it for him."

The coat and the cap were on at last, but then began the struggle about the muffler and the mittens. The mother had crocheted them herself for Keith and insisted that they should be worn whenever he went outdoors during autumn and winter. The muffler was long and white, with blue rings two inches apart, and in shape more like a boa.

Keith wanted the mittens, because his hands got cold easily, but not the muffler, which, he thought, made him look like a girl.

The father objected to everything of that kind, which he said, tended to make the boy soft and susceptible to colds. He himself did not put on an overcoat until the weather grew very severe, and he never buttoned it, no matter how cold it grew. His throat was always bare, and he never wore gloves of any kind. Nor did he ever put his hands in his pockets while walking. He had a favourite trick of picking up a handful of snow, which he rolled into a ball and carried in his hand until it became hard as ice. His hands were milk-white, beautifully shaped and well cared for. It was impossible to believe that for many years they had done the hardest kind of work, often outdoors and generally in a poorly heated drafty shop. He was proud of them, although he pretended not to care when anybody spoke of them, and they filled Keith with admiration and envy. He tried to follow the father's example, but with the result that his hands grew red as boiled crawfish and began to ache under the nails until he had to cry.

"You bring him up a woman," the father muttered, when Keith was ready at last.

Then they left, having been kissed several times each by the mother, who warned Keith not to let go of his father's hand under any circumstances while they were on the streets.

Down in the passageway on the ground floor, Keith started to take off the muffler.

"No," said the father. "Now you keep it on. Your mother has told you to wear it, and you must not take it off behind her back."

"But you didn't want me to have it on," Keith protested in genuine surprise.

"No, I didn't, because I want you to be hardened and grow up like a man. But there is something I want still more, and that is for you to obey your mother, first because children should always obey their parents, and secondly because it makes your mother very unhappy if you don't do as she tells you."

His tone changed slightly during the last part of his remark. Something of an appeal came into it and went straight to Keith's heart, filling it with a glow of righteous determination. It was always that way with him. A word spoken kindly made him eager to comply, and that was particularly the case if it came from some person not given to sentimentality.

In the lane they turned and saw the mother lying in the window to watch them. As usual, kisses were thrown back and forth as they passed up the lane, but Keith felt rather impatient about it, and it was with a marked sense of relief he turned the corner into East Long Street. He was eager to push ahead into unknown regions and did not care to look back.

Although he spoke little enough, the father proved a more genial companion than Keith had dared to expect. In fact, he had been a little oppressed at the thought of being entirely alone with the father, which was quite a new experience to him. But now he found it a pleasure, and their communion seemed more easy than when the mother was with them. He walked sedately enough, clinging to one of his father's soft, white hands, but every so often he ventured a skip and a jump without being rebuked, and on the whole he felt the kind of happiness that used to come on Christmas Eve, after the father had started to distribute the presents.

Keith had frequently accompanied his mother as far as the little square at the end of the street, and he pointed proudly to the grocery store where he had helped to buy things.

"Yes," responded the father, and again his tone seemed strangely unfamiliar to the boy. "I might have had such a store myself, if luck had been with me."

The idea was more than Keith could digest at once. It was too overwhelming, and once more he looked at his father with the feeling of wonder and awe that sometimes took hold of him almost against his will--a feeling that clashed hopelessly with the nervous shyness commonly inspired by the father's stern manners.

"Why didn't you get it," the boy ventured at last.

"Because I was born under the Monkey Star," replied the father grimly.

The boy wondered what kind of star that was, but still more he wondered at the father's mood which appeared to indicate a displeasure not directed at the questioner. Before Keith could ask anything more, they had started across one of the open market places that line the fresh-water side of the old City.

The place was empty except for a few closed and abandoned booths. But at the foot of it lay rows of one-masted sailing vessels loaded halfway up their masts with piles of fire-wood. In the background, beyond a small sheet of water crossed by a low iron bridge, rose abruptly the rocky walls of the South End, with funny old houses perched precariously along their edges. Keith stared so hard at all the new things that not a single question had a chance to escape him before they entered another street and stopped in front of a stone house that to him looked like a castle.

It had a real portal instead of an ordinary doorway, and the inside was still more impressive. Keith had been to church once or twice, and for a moment he thought himself in one. But he saw no seats, and his father did not look solemn at all. The walls were of stone curiously streaked and coloured. The ceiling was so far up that Keith had to bend far backwards to see it. It was full of ornaments and supported by two rows of tall round stone pillars so thick that Keith could not get his arms halfway around one of them. In the background rose a very broad and seemingly endless stairway of white stone. While they climbed it step by step, Keith wondered if the king in his palace had anything like it.

Arrived at the top at last, they turned into a sort of lobby--a rather bare room with several plain desks by the windows and many hooks along the inner wall. There the father took off both his coats and armed himself with a huge feather duster and a rag.

"Remember, Keith," he said in his ordinary tone, "that you may look as much as you please, but that you must not touch anything. If you do, you can never come here again."

Having passed through several smaller rooms, they emerged finally into a hall so bright and spacious that Keith stopped with a gasp and for a moment thought himself in the open air again. It was as wide as the building itself and three sides were full of large windows A counter of mahogany that looked miles long ran from one end to the other. The place behind it contained many desks so tall that Keith could not have reached the tops of them with his raised hand. But from a distance he could see that they were full of tempting things--paper and pens and pencils, red bars of sealing wax, glue-pots and rulers and glistening shears.

Two men, also in their shirt-sleeves, were busy at the desks, dusting them and arranging the things on top of them. And the father quickly went to work in the same way.

It seemed interesting to Keith, who would have liked to try his hand at it. But it also disconcerting for some reason he could not explain and for a while he watched the father as if unwilling to believe his own eyes. Somehow it did not tally with certain notions formed in Keith's head on the night when the church was burning. At last he up to his father and asked:

"Is this where you always work?"

"No," was the answer given with a peculiar grimness. "This is for the officials."

"What are they?"

"Oh, tellers and cashiers and bookkeepers."

Keith noted the words for future inquiries. For the moment they meant nothing to him.

"Why are you not here too," he persisted.

"Because I am only an attendant--a mere vaktmästare. That is a fact you had better fix in your mind once for all, my boy."

"Is that your little boy, Wellander," one of the other men called out at that moment. "Let us have a look at him."

Hand-shakings and head-pattings followed as Keith was presented to "Uncle" This and "Uncle" That. He didn't object and he didn't care. They looked nice enough, and their talk was friendly, but somehow he felt that his parents did not care for them. Some of the glamour had left the place. In spite of its magnificence, he did not like it, although he was glad to have seen it.

Discovering a wastepaper basket full of envelopes with brightly coloured marks on them, he regained his interest a little. He knew those marks for stamps and they had pictures on them which attracted him very much. So he made a bee-line for the basket and proceeded to pick out what he liked best.

"Have you forgotten what I told you," he heard his father shout to him.

"They have been thrown away," he said going toward the father.

"That is neither here nor there," was the sharp answer he got. "You know they are not yours, and so you must not touch them. Put them back at once."

Keith did as he was told, wondering if he really had done anything wrong or if his father merely objected for some reason of his own.

Then he walked around uninterested and forlorn until they were ready to go home again. The stairway seemed shorter as they descended, but the pillars were tall and thick as before. And on the way home his father found a little shop open and bought him a few öre's worth of hard candy.

It was the only time Keith could ever remember his having done such a thing.

The lodger happened to be away when they got home, and the mother had opened the door to the parlour in order to get a little more air and light into the living-room. After dinner the father went into the parlour to take a nap on the big sofa, while the mother settled down comfortably in her easy chair, a piece of handiwork on her lap as usual. Keith took up his customary position on the footstool to tell her what he had seen and done during his morning excursion.

She was eager to hear everything and helped him along with questions, and yet there ran through her very eagerness a subtle inner resistance which the boy felt vaguely. It as if she never really cared for anything concerning him in which she herself had not taken part.

The original glamour had returned to every aspect of his new experience, and he tried excitedly to describe the wonders of the vestibule, the stairway and the big hall. In the midst of it he paused suddenly and fell to staring into vacancy.

"Was that all," she asked, puzzled by his silence.

"Lena dusts our rooms, doesn't she," was his rather startling counter-question.

"Mostly," the mother replied with a searching glance at his puckered brows. "Although I sometimes ..."

"You don't have to," the boy broke in.

"No" she admitted, "but then I am sure it is properly done."

"Is that why papa dusts the tables in the bank?"

A pause followed during which it was the mother's turn to stand the boy's intense scrutiny.

"No," she said at last. "He does it because it is a part of his work, and a shame it is that he has to. Scrub-women come in and do the rest of the cleaning, but they are not trusted with the desks, and so the attendants have to take turns doing that part of it. That's why your father has to leave so very early in the morning."

Mother and son lapsed into silence once more. It was broken by another question from the boy.

"Why couldn't I take some stamps that had been thrown away?"

"Had your father said anything about it before you took them?"

"He told me not to touch anything."

"Then you couldn't because he had told you to leave things alone. He is so careful in all such matters. Sometimes he goes a little too far, perhaps, but you can be sure that he means right. Other people want the stamps, and there is a lot of gossip and envy about everything, and he is too proud to be dragged into that sort of thing. It is always better, Keith, to leave alone what you know is not your own. Honesty endures beyond all else."

Keith made no direct response, but sprang one more irrelevant question:

"Why didn't papa get the grocery store?"

"How do you know," the mother demanded with a quick glance at him.

"Papa told me."

"Well," she drawled as if thinking. Then she settled back in the chair, her mind made up. "Listen, and I will tell you a story. Once upon a time there was a rich old man who owned a grocery store."

"That's where they sell prunes and raisins and sugar," the boy put in.

"And the store was so fine," she went on unheedingly, "that the old man was permitted to sell all those things to the king's own kitchen. The old man had many assistants, but at the head of them all was a young man who knew just what to do, because he had worked in such stores ever since he was a little boy. And he was so honest and able and polite that the people liked him very much and came to the store for his sake, but the old man liked him more anybody else."

"Was the old man nice," Keith asked.

"Yes, indeed, but he was also very peculiar, and the most peculiar thing about him was that he hated all women and thought that a man who married was lost for ever."

"Did he have any children?"

"No, men who want no wives get no children. That is a part of their punishment. And so when the owner of the store got older and older, and began to feel tired, he didn't know to whom he should leave the store. You may be sure that he thought it over many times, because he was exceedingly proud of the store and wanted it to go on. The result of his thinking was that he decided to give it to the young man whom he trusted and liked so much."

"How did the young man look," Keith broke in.

"Something like your father, I should say. But while all this was going on, the young man had met a princess and fallen in love with her...."

"A real princess," asked the boy with wide-open eyes.

"All princesses are real in their own opinion. And she and the young man had promised to marry each other, and this the old man learned at last. Then he was very, very angry and told the young man that he was a fool. And when the young man answered that there were many of his kind, and that he had pledged his word, the old man told him that he would not get the store unless he promised to have nothing more to do with the princess. But the young man loved her and would not give her up, and so, you see--he didn't get the store. Don't you think that was nobly done, Keith?"

"Ye-es," the boy assented without particular enthusiasm, "but if he had got the store, we should have been rich now?"

"We," repeated the mother in a funny tone. "Why, then there would have been no we."

"Why not," he demanded.

"Or it might have been worse still," she whispered as if momentarily forgetful of the boy's presence.

"There is your father now," she said a moment later, when a slight stir was heard in the adjoining room. "Don't say anything more about the store.... Do you know what your father wanted to be most of all?"

Keith looked up speculatively as his father appeared at the doorway to the parlour--a man of medium height, who stooped because he was nearsighted, and so looked shorter than he was, but also stronger because of the great width of his shoulders.

"I can tell you," the father put in. "When I couldn't study, I wanted to be a sailor, and I tried to take hire on a ship whose master knew me and wished to help me. Then they found out that I was too nearsighted to steer by the compass, and that was the end of it. Didn't I tell that I was born under the Monkey Star?"

"Don't talk like that, Carl," the mother protested, rising to give him a kiss. "You have done very well, and there is no man in the bank more respected than you."

"Yes," he admitted with something like a grin. "They know I wouldn't steal even if I had a chance, and they let me collect four million crowns, as I did the other day, but I shall never get beyond where I am today. So there you are--what's struck for a farthing will never be a dollar."

Keith's head was still full of what he had heard when he went to bed that night, and he didn't know whether to feel happy or unhappy about it. His father had grown bigger and more interesting in some ways, and yet the boy's chief impression was of a failure and a fall. It was this impression that stuck most deeply in his mind.

Keith's home was not one of those hospitable places with the doors always wide open, to which people are drawn almost against their will and from which they come away with difficulty. Perhaps it was, above all, the spirit of the father that settled this matter. To him, more than to any Englishman, his home was his castle, and he liked to keep the drawbridge raised against unwelcome company. And most company seemed unwelcome, although at times, when the right persons appeared at the right moment, he could be happy as a child and unbend in a manner that made Keith gape with wonder. When her good mood prevailed, the mother, too, was touchingly eager for the diversion provided by a chance visit, but when the dark moments came, she shunned everybody, while at the same time she watched any prolonged failure to call with morbid suspiciousness, ascribing it promptly to a sense of superiority toward herself and her family. Granny was glad enough to talk to anybody, but she would never ask any one to call, and if no one came, she was apt to dig out some particularly bitter proverb, like "money alone has many friends."

Both parents could be hospitable enough when occasion so demanded, but it was a formal thing with them, exercised only after due preparation. In many ways, they were large-heartedly generous, but only in a serious manner, when actual need required it. They might give freely beyond what they could well afford, but the father could be out of humour for days if some little thing regarded as particularly his own had been touched or used by another member of the family.

As it was, people came and went a good deal, but they came formally or because some specific errand brought them, and most of the errands, Keith soon realized, were connected with a desire for help. The old women living like nightbirds in the garret, would drop in frequently, and almost invariably with some tale of woe that sooner or later drew from the mother relief in one form or another. And one of Keith's earliest tasks, half coveted and half feared, was to walk up to one of the attics with a plate of soup or a saucer full of jam or some other tidbit. Others would come from the outside, and they, too, were mostly old women. They always wanted to pat Keith, and he objected passionately to all of them. His especial aversion was a gaunt old woman with a big hooked nose and a pair of startlingly large, sad-looking eyes. She always smiled, and her smile was hopelessly out of keeping with the rest of her face. The very sight of her made Keith forget all his manners. Time and again his mother rebuked him and tried to bring him around by telling the old woman's story--a story of wonderful self-sacrifice and heroic struggle--but it made no difference to him. There was something about the sight of poverty and unhappiness and failure that provoked him beyond endurance, and sometimes he would turn to his mother with a reckless cry of:

"Why do you let them come here at all?"

For the friends of the family, who came there on an equal footing, he showed more respect, and for a few of them he felt a real liking. As a rule, however, they inspired him with nothing but indifference, and his one reason for greeting them with some approach at cordiality was that they brought a change into the general monotony of the home, and that their coming might lead to the distribution of some dainties out of the ordinary. Some of his parents' friends were poor and growing poorer. Others had the appearance of doing well and hoping for more. It made no difference to Keith. They were all middle-aged, sedate and preoccupied with their own little affairs. They tried to be nice to him, but they did not interest him, and his main grievance against them--not clearly understood by any means--was that they brought nothing into his life of what he wanted.

Had he been asked what he wanted, he would have answered unhesitatingly:

"Some one to play with."

Having whined and nagged until his mother no longer could bear it, Keith at last obtained the cherished permission to go and play in the lane.

"But look out for horses," warned his mother as he stood in the doorway ready to run. "And don't run out of sight, and you must come when I call, and--you had better keep away from other boys, or you may come home quite naked this time."

"What do you mean," asked Keith, turning to see whether the mother was joking or talking seriously.

"Don't you recall when those boys took your coat from you, and you came up here crying?"

There could be no mistake about her meaning just what she said. Keith stood still thinking very hard. Here was another memory that he could not remember at all. There was not a trace of it left in his mind, and yet it must have happened. It sounded exciting, too, and he wished to know all about it.

"You had better close the door," his mother suggested.

"All right," said Keith, hastening to close the door from the outside and make a dive for the stairway. There would be plenty of time to ask about the loss of his coat later. He was halfway down the first flight when he heard the kitchen door open behind him, and his heart leapt into his throat.

"You must go down the stairs quietly," his mother called out from above, whereupon Keith's heart resumed its normal position.

He descended the rest of that flight on tip-toe. The second one was taken more rapidly, and down the last one he went two steps at a time, the little iron plates under his heels hitting the stones with a ring that echoed through the old house.

In the lane he found them loading a dray in front of the distillery, and he started across to watch the men straining at the next barrel. He had hardly taken a step in that direction, however, when a loud pop was heard from the black cave forming the entrance to the distillery. It was followed first by a single cry, and then by a hubbub of voices. A second later a young man came running out and threw himself prone into the gutter, where a trickle of water was to be seen.

Keith was too astonished to be frightened at once. He could not understand what made the man act in this way. Then another man came out in a rush and began to beat the legs of the man in the gutter with his hands, and Keith suddenly noticed that little blue flames were dancing up and down the grimy leathern trousers of the first man.

The memory of the night when the church burned leaped into his mind, making him turn instinctively toward the passageway and his mother's lap.

At that moment a third man appeared carrying a big tank full of water which he poured over the man in the gutter. The latter got on his feet and limped back into the distillery, supported by his two comrades.

Keith was left behind, trembling a little and gazing curiously at the hanging head of the dray-horse which had not made the slightest movement during the previous excitement.

"He'll have to go to bed," said a sleepy voice at his shoulder just then.

Keith swung around as if touched by an electric shock. Before him he saw another small boy, apparently of his own age, but a little taller, and light-haired like himself.

"What's your name," asked Keith as soon as he caught his breath.

"Johan," answered the other stolidly, but not unfriendly.

"Have you got another name like me?"

"My name is Johan Peter Gustafsson," was the reply given in the tone of a lesson painfully learned.

"Where do you live?"

"Right here."

"Not in our house," Keith protested.

"No, down there," Johan explained, pointing to the little side door leading into the courtyard of one of the corner houses at the Quay.

"What's your father?" Keith continued his cross-examination.

"Vaktmästare" said Johan indifferently.

"So is mine," Keith cried eagerly. "Have you got a bank, too?"

Johan shook his head as if unable to grasp what Keith meant.

"My popsey works in the office down there," he said, "and we live beside it, and at night I go with popsey when he carries all the mail to the postoffice."

"Why do you call him popsey," inquired Keith, fascinated by the new word and wondering if he would dare use it to his own father.

"Because that's what he is," Johan declared.

A few minutes later they were playing together as if they had known each other for ever. They had just discovered an unusually large and tempting pin in a crack at the bottom of the gutter, when Keith heard his mother calling from the window above:

"What are you doing, Keith?"

"Oh, just playing," he replied without looking up, forgetful of everything but the pin that would not come out of the crack.

"Who is that with you?"

"That is Johan," Keith shouted back triumphantly, "and his papa is a vaktmästare, too."

"Come right up and let me speak to you," was the insistant rejoinder from above.

"Oh, please, mamma," the boy pleaded, his voice breaking a little, "can't I stay just a little longer?"

"You must come at once," his mother commanded.

"Is that your mumsey," Johan asked.

"It is my mamma," Keith retorted, his attention momentarily diverted by Johan's most peculiar way of referring to his parents.

"Then you had better go," advised the new friend sagely, "or she will tell your popsey, and then you know what happens to you."

"I think I can come down again, if you wait for me," cried Keith as he ran into the long dark passageway.

At that moment a cry of "Johan" rose from the lower part of the lane, and Keith had to come back once more to look.

"There's my mumsey now," said Johan philosophically, pointing to an open window on the ground floor of the corner house. With that he slouched off in a manner that Keith half envied and half resented.

The sudden emergence of Johan had filled Keith's heart with a new hope. Here was a possible playmate at last. The fact that his father was a vaktmästare like Keith's ought to settle all paternal opposition, the boy thought. But to his great surprise, he found this not to be the case.

A severe cross-examination followed his return home. In the midst of it, Keith made a grievous strategic mistake, lured on by his insatiable curiosity about strange words.

"Why does Johan call his mamma 'mumsey' and his papa 'popsey,'" he asked unexpectedly. "It sounds funny."

"Because he does not know any better," his mother rejoined with unmistakable disapproval. "It doesn't sound nice, and it isn't nice."

"But his papa and mamma don't care," Keith objected.

"That's the worst of it," said the mother. "It shows they are not very nice people, and I wish to talk to your father before you can play with Johan any more."

"I have heard of them," the grandmother piped up, making them both turn towards her, one hopefully and the other doubtfully.

The grandmother never left the kitchen. She walked from the sofa to the big foot-stool, from the foot-stool to the table by the window, and from the table back to the sofa. Sometimes she would not be seen talking to another person for days. And yet she had a miraculous way of surprising the rest of the family with pieces of gossip picked out of the air, one might think. There was apparently not a person in the neighbourhood of whom she had not heard, and about whom she could not give some more or less intimate piece of information. They were all perfect strangers to her, but she followed their lives with as much keenness for minute details as if they had been her nearest kin or dear friends.

"She was a cook in the house of the man whose office Gustafsson works in," the grandmother went on. "He used to do odd jobs for the family, cutting wood and such things, and in that way he met her in the kitchen, and one fine day they decided to get married. She is older than him, and I guess it was her last chance. But the family was crazy about her, and when they heard of it, they gave him the place of attendant in the office downstairs and the two rooms back of the office to live in. He was just a peasant boy, and she reads the Bible all day and goes to prayer-meeting at night."

"How do you know all that," wondered Keith's mother, having learned by this time that the old woman's gossip was generally well founded on truth.

"Oh," the grandmother said with a queer smile particular to such occasions, "a little bird sang it to me."

"I think they must be rather low people," Keith's mother concluded.

"Perhaps," the grandmother said, "but they have plenty of religion at least, and I don't think the boy can do much harm to Keith."

Keith ran up to the grandmother and kissed her impulsively.

That night there was a great family council. Keith's father was told about Johan and the Gustafssons.

"I think they are about as good as ourselves," was his verdict, given in a tone suggesting contempt for his own position rather than respect for that of Johan's father. "But Keith has his toys, and that ought to be enough for him."

"It is rather lonely for him," the mother rejoined, "and he should get out a little, I suppose, but I hate to have him playing about the streets, and I fear Johan's manners are not very good."

"The best thing is to send him to school," said the father.

"What are you talking of, Carl," the mother cried. "The idea--when he is barely five!"

"He knows more about the letters than I did when I began school at seven," the father came back unperturbed.

"I don't think it would be very bad for him to play a little with Johan now and then," said the mother evasively, bending down to kiss Keith, who had snuggled up to her during the preceding talk. Then she put her hand through his waves of almost flaxen hair, bent his head slightly backward, looked straight into his eyes, and asked:

"You don't want to leave me, do you?"

"No," said Keith, hugging her passionately, "but I think I should like to go to school."

The idea carried no distinct image to his mind, and he felt a little timid toward all those unknown possibilities implied by the word school, but this slight feeling of hesitation was swamped by a longing so restless and so irresistible that it sent tears to his eyes, although he could not tell himself what it was he longed for.

It was true that Keith knew a good deal for his age. In fact, he had mastered the whole alphabet and was making good progress in spelling under his mother's guidance. He was eager and quick to learn. Generally his interest was rather fitful, but along this one line it showed no wavering. It was as if the boy had known that the art of reading would offer him an escape of some sort.

He might have advanced still more rapidly if his mother had been more steady in her teaching. She was very proud of him, and she spoke of reading and studying as if there were nothing finer in the world.

"No better burden bears any man than much wisdom," she quoted one day from the old Eddas--probably without knowing the source. "I know, if any one does, what lack of money means, but I want you rather to have learning than wealth. Then, when the whole world is listening to you with bated breath, I shall walk across North Bridge resting on your arm, and I shall be repaid for all that my own life has not brought me. We shall walk arm in arm, you and I, at four o'clock, when the King goes for a walk, too, and all Stockholm is there to see.... Will you do that, Keith?"

"Of course," he cried, his eyes shining.

But sometimes she was helpless in the grip of one of her depressed moods, and then days might go by without a lesson. Far from being made happy by that respite, he would plead with her to be taught "one more little letter," and finally she would bring down the book from the hanging book shelf on the wall back of her easy chair. There stood the a-b-c book she had bought for him, and her favourite hymn-book, and the New Testament given to the father when he left school to begin earning his own living, and the miniature copy of Luther's catechism presented to him at the time of his confirmation. There, too, rested the big Bible which Keith's mother treasured as much as her wedding ring and the bureau that was her chief wedding present. It was a gift from her father when she was confirmed, and on its fly-leaf he had written:

"Belongs to Anna Margareta Carlsson."

It was this Bible rather than the a-b-c book that became the principal means of instruction. Keith loved it, and he could not have been much more than three years old when he first began to pore over its quaint old illustrations. The first of these showed an old man with a long beard and a trailing white garment floating over a sheet of water out of which rose two ragged pieces of rock. At one corner a pallid sun emerged out of the fleeing mists, while, at the opposite corner, a tiny moon crescent seemed about to disappear beneath the stilled waters.

"Who is that," asked Keith not once, but many times.

"That is God creating the world," explained his mother.

"But I don't see the world."

"It is just coming out," she said, pointing to the rocks.

"Who's God," was Keith's next question as a rule.

"He is the father of the whole universe," the mother said reverently.

"Papa's too," asked the boy once, and seeing his mother nod assent, he cried jubilantly:

"Then he must be my grandfather, whose portrait you haven't got!"

More frequently he stopped short as soon as he heard about the universal fatherhood. That was grown-up talk to him, and like much else, it carried no meaning to his mind. Nor did he waste much thought on it after having asked once if he could see God and been told that no man could do that and live. His mind was occupied with food and clothes and toys and people and things. What could never be seen was easily dismissed--much more easily than the spook that one of the servant girls insisted on having seen, thus making Keith's father so angry that he nearly discharged her on the spot. And from that first picture in the Bible the boy turned impatiently to another further on, where a small boy with a sword almost as big as himself was cutting the head off a man much taller than Keith's father. And at the top of each page appeared big black letters which he could recognize almost as easily as those in the a-b-c book, although they were differently shaped and much more pretty to look at.

To Keith this opening up of a new world was exclusively pleasant at first, and so it was to his mother, but other people seemed to be troubled by it at times. One day his free-spoken aunt was visiting with them, and, as usual, disagreeing with Keith's mother, who evidently felt one of her dark spells approaching. Wishing to express her disagreement at some particular point quite forcibly, but wishing also to keep the listening boy from enriching his vocabulary with a term of doubtful desirability, she took the precaution to spell out the too picturesque word:

"R-o-t!" Just then she caught a gleam of aroused interest in Keith's eyes, and to make assurance doubly sure, she hastened to add: "Says rod!"

"No," Keith objected promptly. "It says rot, and I want to know what it means."

"I knew that small pigs also have ears, but I didn't know they could spell," was her amused comment, uttered in a tone that touched something in Keith's inside most pleasantly. Then, however, she went on in a manner grown quite serious:

"You had better send him to school, Anna."

"Yes," replied the mother to Keith's intense surprise, "Carl and I have been talking it over and practically decided to do so. He certainly needs some better guidance than he gets from his poor, good-for-nothing mother."

"Good-for-nothing fiddlesticks!" sputtered the aunt. "You'll make me say something much worse than rot. Anna, if you keep talking like that when the boy hears it."

Keith had heard, but his mind was absorbed by the new idea.

"Well," said his mother, "I cannot take care of him properly. He is running down to that Gustafsson boy all time and most of the time I can't get him home again except by going for him."

"Johan's mother said yesterday that I hadn't been there half an hour when you called for me," Keith broke in. "And then she said that I had better not come back if you don't think Johan good enough for to play with."

"I don't say we are better than anybody else," said the mother, addressing herself to the aunt rather than to Keith. "But I don't know what he is doing when he is down there, and Johan seems such a clod that I can't see why Keith wants to play with him."

"Why can't Johan come up here," asked Keith.

"Because ...," said his mother, and got no further.

"Yes," the aunt declared in a tone of absolute finality, "you must send him to school."

No sooner had the aunt taken her leave than Keith assailed his mother with excited demands for further information. She took his head between her both hands and looked at him as if she would never see him again.

"Only five," she said at last, "and already he wants to get away. A few years more--a few short years--and you will be gone for good, I suppose."

"Oh, mamma," he protested, "you know that I shall never leave you!"

"No, never entirely," she cried, kissing him fervently. "Promise me you won't, Keith!"

He promised, and then he wanted to know what they did in school. But she began to talk about difficulties and dangers and temptations and all sorts of things he couldn't grasp. She spoke with intense feeling, and as always when she was deeply moved, his whole being was set vibrating in tune with her mood. His cheeks flushed, his throat choked, his eyes brimmed over with tears, and at last he began to wonder whether he had not better stay right where he was. Her eyes were dim with tears, too, and once more she took his head between her hands and looked an endless time before she said:

"Now you are beginning life in earnest, Keith!"