w 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 t