Keith would stand in the kitchen door watching them.  First he heard the slow clamp-clamp of ascending foot-steps.  Then the man’s heavy breathing became audible, and Keith felt as if the load was resting on his own shoulders.  Finally the open top of the bag, with its bright stuffing of newly cut birch wood, showed at the corner of the landing quite a long time before the head beneath it came into sight.  As the man crossed the landing in front of Keith, bent almost double under his burden, a dew of pungent perspiration would drop on the slate-coloured stones, leaving behind a curious path of round spots.  Not a word was said at that time, but coming down the men would sometimes throw a crude jest to the bright-eyed watcher or stop to refill their mouths with snuff out of a little thin brass box with a mirror fitted to the inside of its cover.  The sight of the snuff filled Keith with a sense of loathing, although his father used to put a pinch of it into his nostrils now and then, and more than anything else it seemed to mark a distinction between himself and those people from a world far beneath his own.  Theirs was a racking job, heavier than any other known to the boy, and one day he asked his mother: 

“Why do they care to carry all that wood for us?”

“Because we pay them, and because they are mighty glad to get the money.  Otherwise they couldn’t live.”

“And where does the wood come from?”

“The bank sends it as part of papa’s pay.”

Once more Keith was so impressed with the miraculous power of that mysterious being which his father served and cursed and worshipped that his mother’s previous answer was lost for the time being.  But it recurred to his mind later and connected with his father’s talk of making him a carpenter.  A strong prejudice against manual labour was shaping itself in his mind.

After the wood came the victuals:  a tub of butter reaching Keith to the chin; bags of flour; barrels of potatoes and apples; hams and haunches of dried mutton and smoked reindeer meat; and lastly packages of smaller size and sundry contents that the mother promptly carried to the pantry inside the parlour without letting Keith touch them.

This year—­it was the winter following the Franco-Prussian war—­the preparations were rendered uncommonly impressive by the addition of a cheese large as the moon at full.  There was always plenty of cheese of various kinds in the house:  whole milk cheese carefully aged until its flavour was like that of English Stilton or Italian Gorgonzola; skim milk cheese stuffed with cloves and cardamom seeds; and dark brown goat milk cheese of a cloying sweetness that Keith detested.