Seats were reserved in one of the side galleries for the pupils from Old Mary.  Two teachers sat in one of the front pews, so that they could look down into the church.  Aspiring youngsters who wanted to make sure of good marks were apt to look upon the same pews with special favour.  The rest of the boys wanted to sit as far back as possible, where they could whisper, and show each other pictures, and eat candy without too much danger of being discovered.  These pursuits brought no relief 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 to the university, Wellander, won’t you—­you with your brilliant mind?”