d he had none at all. Having discovered that a friend
of the family, who until then had been regarded with supreme
indifference, held some sort of clerical position in a publishing house,
his devotion to Uncle Lander suddenly became effusive and he begged so
shamelessly and so successfully that at last his father had to
intercede. Out of a half-hour sermon on things that must not be done,
Keith grasped only that, as usual, he could not do what he wanted. Money
was still a mystery to him, and he never suspected that Uncle Lander
would have to pay his employers for every book taken out of the stock.

The sole check to his passion sprang logically from the very fervor of
that passion: a book being such a precious object to himself, he could
not dream of taking it away from somebody else. As in a flash the true
spirit of his father's objection to borrowed books was revealed to him.
That objection became his own and stuck to him through life: if he liked
a borrowed book, the inescapable duty of returning it was too painful to
be faced, and if he didn't like it, there was no reason for borrowing
it. Books became sacred things to him, to be cherished and protected as
nothing else. The loss of one was a catastrophe.

Soon he had a small library of his own, kept on a shelf in the huge
wardrobe that stood in the vestibule leading to the parlour. Made up at
first of odds and ends bearing no real relation to his desire for
reading matter, it gradually acquired a certain homogeneity reflecting
the boy's state of mind. Books of travel and adventure continued to
prevail for a long while. Equally favoured were stories dealing with
Norse Mythology and the heroic legends of his race. The grim record of
the Niebelungs was familiar to him at the age of eight, and the first
heroes of his worship were young Siegfried of divine aspect and Dietrich
of Bern, who seemed to the boy the final embodiment of worldly wisdom.
To these should be added Garibaldi, of whose South American campaigns,
so touchingly shared by the faithful Anita, he read graphic accounts in
an odd volume of an illustrated weekly. The word liberty first came to
him from the lips of the picturesque Italian, while Anita and the women
of the old Germanic sagas struck him by their contrast to his mother.

In the main, all his reading made for escape and compensation. He read
to get away from his own surroundings, and he revelled in characters of
fiction and legend and history tha