It turned out to be the sexton of a country parish on the northern shore of Lake Maelaren who had devised this means of eking out his probably limited professional income.  The ensuing correspondence had proved quite satisfactory.  The mother was evidently pleased.  It was almost as good as staying with the pastor himself, she said.

Keith knew what a pastor was.  He had several times heard one preach from a funny hanging box in Great Church, and he thought of him as a man who was always dressed in black and who was even more serious than the father.  But it did not bother him, partly because he realized that, after all, a sexton was not the same as a pastor, and partly because his mind was full of something else.  It was not the country, although his previous experience of it, when he was staying with his aunt, had given him a rather favourable impression.  No, what occupied him to the exclusion of everything else was the thought that he would be able to play with other children all day long, and that there would be no one to pull him away just as a game was becoming really interesting.

Exciting days of preparation followed.  And finally the day of departure dawned.

The greater part of the journey was to be made by boat to the little town of Enkoeping, where Mr. Swensson, the sexton, would be waiting with a team.  The mother could not go along, and so Keith was placed in the hands of some people going the same way, who promised to look after him and see that he did not fall into wrong hands when the steamer landed.

Keith had to stand in the stern of the boat and wave his handkerchief as long as his mother remained visible.  Then he was free, at last, to surrender himself to the novelty of his situation.  And as always upon such occasions, when new impressions came crowding in upon him, the record became too blurred for clear remembrance.  This was true not only of the trip on the steamer, the arrival at Enkoeping with its little old-fashioned red houses, the meeting with Mr. Swanson, the drive of thirty miles or more inland, the arrival at the sexton’s house not far from a white spired church, and the introduction to a seemingly endless number of new faces, but of the whole long summer.  A couple of months sufficed to wipe out of his memory everything but a few comparatively trivial incidents and impressions.

Only one name escaped the general oblivion—­that of the sexton himself.  Only one view left a lasting image behind—­that of a tremendously large boulder, a memento of the glacial period, that rose like a crude monument right in the centre of a tilled field almost, but not quite out of sight of the house.  Only one face would come back in recognizable shape when he tried to recall that rather momentous summer—­that of a boy a few years older than himself, who was the leader of all the games played around the big rock in the open field.

XI