p
of interest that drew from him flashes of that brightness of mind that
had won Dally and given him the reputation of an exceptional pupil.

But as the spring term drew nearer its close, he found it more and more
difficult to keep up a pretence at attention. More and more he sank into
mere drifting, and he whose pride had been really to know, now trusted
to luck like any dullard with a head unfit for studying. Worse still and
more significant, he began to find excuses for staying home from school.
He who had never known what it was to be sick, now developed disturbing
symptom after another--headaches and colds and digestive troubles in
endless succession. Most of the time these symptoms yielded quickly at
the mere sight of the castor oil which was his mother's favourite remedy
and the taste of which Keith hated more than anything else in the world.
It was the one thing that stood inexorably between his growing indolence
and the luxury of being ill.

With commencement almost in sight, all sorts of written examinations
were demanded. These he disliked additionally because his handwriting
never had developed in proportion to his mental capacity. No matter how
he strove, the letters remained childishly awkward. No two of them
seemed to point in the same direction. Not even his futile efforts at
singing could fill him with a more humiliating sense of inferiority.

All his various resistances were brought into concerted action when at
last the teacher in Swedish ordered him to prepare two brief original
compositions on quite simple themes. In the days of Dally he would have
revelled in such a task. Now it appalled him. His head was empty. The
mere idea of trying to write about such things as the discovery of
America and the beauties of nature seemed silly. There was any number of
books, besides, that said anything you could ever hope to say on
either subject.

The end of it was that he produced an indisposition real enough not only
to convince his mother but to make himself willing to face the ordeal of
castor oil. Thanks to the oil he was able to stay in bed the better part
of two days. Those were the last two days before his Swedish
compositions were to be delivered. He knew that if they were not
delivered, he would get no mark in that subject, and this would prevent
his graduation to a higher grade.

In that dilemma he conceived the brilliant idea of making his mother
write the compositions for him, and he actually s