rely served to plunge him more deeply
into the sham life of his books.

Yet he was not without courage, and it was not physical pain, or the
fear of it, that brought the tears so quickly into flowing. Once, when
returning home with an uncovered bowl full of molasses from the grocery,
he stumbled at the foot of the stairs and fell so his forehead struck
the edge of the lowest step and his scalp was cut open to the width of
nearly an inch. The blood blinded him so that he could barely make his
way upstairs. When he reached the kitchen at last, his mother was scared
almost out of her wits, and her fright was augmented by the manner in
which he sobbed as if his heart were breaking. When at last the flow of
blood was partly stenched and his crying still continued, his mother
tried to tell him that there was no cause to be scared.

"I am not scared," he sputtered to her surprise. "I didn't know I was
hurt, but ... but ... I spilled all the molasses."

That night his father gave him a shining new silver coin without telling
him why, and the boy couldn't guess it at the time, though later he
learned the reason from his mother.

A favourite method employed by the father to test and to develop his
courage was to send him alone after dark on some errand into the cellar
or up into the attic, and the boy went without protest, no matter how
much he might dread the task at heart. Even the servant girls felt
reluctant about visiting the cellar at night, and the occasional
discovery of a drunken man asleep in front of the cellar door made the
danger far from imaginary.

Going down to the cellar, Keith was permitted to bring a candle along,
but the danger of fire made this out of the question when the attic was
his goal. One night on his way up there, he discovered a white,
fluttering shape by the square opening in the outer wall. He stopped on
the spot, and his heart almost stopped, too--but only for a moment.
Driven by some necessity he could not explain to himself, he picked
himself together and pushed on, only to find that the intimidating
spectre consisted of some white clothing hung for drying on the iron rod
of the shutter and kept moving by a high wind. It was a lesson that went
right home and stuck.

During that one moment of hesitation, the idea of a ghost tried to take
form in his more or less paralysed consciousness. He had read of ghosts,
and overheard stories told by the servant girls in apparent good faith,
and that