f to Keith,
partly because he possessed neither pictures nor candy, being always
very shy of pocket money, and partly because either fear or some sort of
pride made him draw back from engaging in any sort of mischief behind
the teacher's back.

The hymn singing was not without a certain enjoyment. The slowness of
the tempo made it possible for Keith to keep in tune by leaning very
close to the boy sitting next to him. Even the reading of the gospels
and other recurring features of the service could be borne. But when the
sermon began, Keith fell into sheer agony. The other boys seemed capable
of letting the words of the preacher drop off them as water drops off
the oily feathers of a water-fowl. But one of Keith's characteristics
was that he had to listen to anything said loudly enough in his
presence. For him there was no escape. Through an endless hour, that
sometimes would verge on the five quarters, he had to sit there and take
in every word of a long-winded, moralistic discourse dealing in
forbidding terms with things that left his brain as untouched as if they
had been uttered in a strange tongue. He had a sense of warnings and
threats that seemed to connect with what his mother had asked him not to
heed. He was told to believe, but he could not make out what it was he
should believe--unless it was the Small Catechism, and that had always
left his mind a perfect blank although he knew it by heart from the
first page to the last.

When at last the ordeal was over, he rushed away with a sense of relief
that was marred by the thought of the same thing happening two weeks
later. It was the only feature of his schooling that left behind an
actual sense of grievance which the passing years could not mollify.

XXII

A little before commencement the whole school was stirred by important
news. A reorganization of the entire school system was in progress, and
one result of it was the merger of the old _gymnasium_ or high school on
Knight's Island with Old Mary and the expansion of the latter to nine
grades under the new name of St. Mary's Higher Latin School. A building
across the street had already been acquired for the four new grades, and
a new rector of higher rank was to take charge in the fall.

"It means that we'll stay right here until we go to the university," one
of Keith's classmates explained in a tone implying that it must make
quite a difference to their lives. Then he asked suddenly: "You'll go on
t