n. 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," a