From the first he found fault with the new addition to his army, and one day not long afterwards he charged the whole regiment with cowardice in the face of the enemy.  A drumhead court martial was held on the spot, and the verdict was a foregone conclusion.  The culprits were found guilty in a body and sentenced to immediate execution.  Then Keith possessed himself surreptitiously of the family hammer, and when his mother came to investigate the noise he was making the whole offensive regiment had been reduced to scraps.  Never before or after did Keith as a general go to such extremes on behalf of military morale.

But many, many years later, when he stopped for the first time at a typical English hotel, he found himself horribly embarrassed by the assistance forced on him by the obligatory valet.

III

In Sweden the principal celebration with its distribution of gifts takes place late on Christmas Eve.

Long before that day Keith began to watch every package brought into the house.  Soon he noticed several that disappeared quickly without having been opened.  Nor did it take his shrewd little mind long to figure out that they must have been stowed away on the upper shelf of the pantry back of the parlour.  This was an excellent hiding-place because the shelf in question was fully six feet above the floor and on a level with the lintel of the doorway, so that its contents seemed as much out of reach as they were out sight from below.

One day, however, Keith succeeded in getting into the parlour when both parents were out.  The night before his father had come home with an unusually large and queerly shaped package under his arm and had taken it straight into the parlour.  The boy’s curiosity was at fever heat and got the better of his customary inertia in the face of explicit prohibitions.  Having dragged a heavy wooden chair into the pantry, he placed its tall back directly against the shelves.  The crosspieces in the back of the chair formed rungs on which he climbed up to the top shelf.  It was quite a feat for a very small boy, but the slight timidity that characterized him as a rule was totally forgotten for the time.

There was the mystifying package together with many others.  He could even touch it with his hand.  In spite of its size, it was very light.  It was wider at the bottom than at the top, and it sounded hollow when he knocked at it.  His little brain worked at high pressure, but not a guess came out of it that was at all plausible.  Finally Keith had to climb down no wiser than he was before.  His failure had one advantage.  It freed him from all of guilt.  It served also to keep his expectations at an unusually high pitch, so that when the morning of the great day arrived at last, it seemed as if he were facing twelve long hours of actual torture.