ay
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