He might have advanced still more rapidly if his mother had been more steady in her teaching.  She was very proud of him, and she spoke of reading and studying as if there were nothing finer in the world.

“No better burden bears any man than much wisdom,” she quoted one day from the old Eddas—­probably without knowing the source.  “I know, if any one does, what lack of money means, but I want you rather to have learning than wealth.  Then, when the whole world is listening to you with bated breath, I shall walk across North Bridge resting on your arm, and I shall be repaid for all that my own life has not brought me.  We shall walk arm in arm, you and I, at four o’clock, when the King goes for a walk, too, and all Stockholm is there to see....  Will you do that, Keith?”

“Of course,” he cried, his eyes shining.

But sometimes she was helpless in the grip of one of her depressed moods, and then days might go by without a lesson.  Far from being made happy by that respite, he would plead with her to be taught “one more little letter,” and finally she would bring down the book from the hanging book shelf on the wall back of her easy chair.  There stood the a-b-c book she had bought for him, and her favourite hymn-book, and the New Testament given to the father when he left school to begin earning his own living, and the miniature copy of Luther’s catechism presented to him at the time of his confirmation.  There, too, rested the big Bible which Keith’s mother treasured as much as her wedding ring and the bureau that was her chief wedding present.  It was a gift from her father when she was confirmed, and on its fly-leaf he had written: 

“Belongs to Anna Margareta Carlsson.”

It was this Bible rather than the a-b-c book that became the principal means of instruction.  Keith loved it, and he could not have been much more than three years old when he first began to pore over its quaint old illustrations.  The first of these showed an old man with a long beard and a trailing white garment floating over a sheet of water out of which rose two ragged pieces of rock.  At one corner a pallid sun emerged out of the fleeing mists, while, at the opposite corner, a tiny moon crescent seemed about to disappear beneath the stilled waters.

“Who is that,” asked Keith not once, but many times.

“That is God creating the world,” explained his mother.

“But I don’t see the world.”

“It is just coming out,” she said, pointing to the rocks.

“Who’s God,” was Keith’s next question as a rule.

“He is the father of the whole universe,” the mother said reverently.

“Papa’s too,” asked the boy once, and seeing his mother nod assent, he cried jubilantly: 

“Then he must be my grandfather, whose portrait you haven’t got!”