hat warned small folk and big of what was
going to happen. It was Keith's first acquaintance with music.

The parents' bed occupied the centre of the right-hand wall, between
mamma's bureau and another chest of drawers known as "Granny's bureau."
It was all wood and made in two parts that slid into each other,
reducing the daytime width of the bed by one-half. It stood parallel to
the wall, instead of at right angles, and the extension took place
sideways. At night it looked like an ordinary double bed. In the day it
almost disappeared beneath a rectangular pile of bed-clothing, covered
by a snow-white spread that was pulled and smoothed and tucked until it
hung straight as a wall.

Granny's bureau, old-fashioned and clumsy, but made of some native wood
that glimmered like gold, was largely devoted to linen ware for bed and
table. At the top it had two small drawers instead of a long, and one of
these constituted the first storage place set aside for Keith's special
use. His impression was that it had always been his, and once he asked
his mother if it really had been his before he was born.

"Of course it was," she said with a sly smile, "but we took the liberty
to use it for other purposes until you arrived"

At first glance this seemed quite reasonable to Keith, though nothing to
smile at so far as he could see. Later he became conscious of a vague
sense of annoyance. It would have been more pleasant if no one else had
ever used that drawer.

Across the room from Granny's bureau, in the corner just inside the door
to the kitchen, towered the characteristic Swedish oven--a round column
of white glazed bricks, with highly polished brass shutters in front of
the small cubical fire-place, where nothing but birchwood was burned. In
the narrow crack between the oven and the wall rested always a birch
rod, which was often referred to at critical moments. A new rod, with
brightly coloured feathers attached to the tip of every twig, appeared
regularly on Shrove Tuesday and tended slightly to spoil that otherwise
glorious day, when large cross buns stuffed with a mixture of crushed
almond and sugar were served in hot milk for dinner. Though the rod was
little more than a symbol of family discipline, Keith always disliked
its presence as a threat to his dignity if not to his hide.

A double washstand, looking like a document chest in the daytime, the
chaiselongue on which Keith slept at night, and the door to the best
roo