More frequently he stopped short as soon as he heard about the universal fatherhood.  That was grown-up talk to him, and like much else, it carried no meaning to his mind.  Nor did he waste much thought on it after having asked once if he could see God and been told that no man could do that and live.  His mind was occupied with food and clothes and toys and people and things.  What could never be seen was easily dismissed—­much more easily than the spook that one of the servant girls insisted on having seen, thus making Keith’s father so angry that he nearly discharged her on the spot.  And from that first picture in the Bible the boy turned impatiently to another further on, where a small boy with a sword almost as big as himself was cutting the head off a man much taller than Keith’s father.  And at the top of each page appeared big black letters which he could recognize almost as easily as those in the a-b-c book, although they were differently shaped and much more pretty to look at.

To Keith this opening up of a new world was exclusively pleasant at first, and so it was to his mother, but other people seemed to be troubled by it at times.  One day his free-spoken aunt was visiting with them, and, as usual, disagreeing with Keith’s mother, who evidently felt one of her dark spells approaching.  Wishing to express her disagreement at some particular point quite forcibly, but wishing also to keep the listening boy from enriching his vocabulary with a term of doubtful desirability, she took the precaution to spell out the too picturesque word: 

“R-o-t!” Just then she caught a gleam of aroused interest in Keith’s eyes, and to make assurance doubly sure, she hastened to add:  “Says rod!”

“No,” Keith objected promptly.  “It says rot, and I want to know what it means.”

“I knew that small pigs also have ears, but I didn’t know they could spell,” was her amused comment, uttered in a tone that touched something in Keith’s inside most pleasantly.  Then, however, she went on in a manner grown quite serious: 

“You had better send him to school, Anna.”

“Yes,” replied the mother to Keith’s intense surprise, “Carl and I have been talking it over and practically decided to do so.  He certainly needs some better guidance than he gets from his poor, good-for-nothing mother.”

“Good-for-nothing fiddlesticks!” sputtered the aunt.  “You’ll make me say something much worse than rot.  Anna, if you keep talking like that when the boy hears it.”

Keith had heard, but his mind was absorbed by the new idea.

“Well,” said his mother, “I cannot take care of him properly.  He is running down to that Gustafsson boy all time and most of the time I can’t get him home again except by going for him.”

“Johan’s mother said yesterday that I hadn’t been there half an hour when you called for me,” Keith broke in.  “And then she said that I had better not come back if you don’t think Johan good enough for to play with.”