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.

III

In Sweden the principal celebration with its distr