A few sad days followed.  Then his life resumed its customary tone, and it was as if the lank, but to him far from ludicrous, shape of Don Quixote had never crossed his horizon.  And soon after Christmas recurred once more.

Among the many packages falling to his share, there were two of a shape that suggested the possibility of more tin soldiers.  But when he held them in his hand, they failed to yield to pressure as would a cardboard box.  Curiosity turned into genuine suspense.  And when at last two books lay in front of him as his own, with the implied permission that he could read them to his heart’s content whenever he chose, a pang of something like real love for his father shot through his heart.

Those two little volumes became at once his most priceless possession and the foundation of his first library.  To others they might appear quite commonplace books, without much value from any point of view.  To him they were passports to a realm of action and freedom and colour, where he could roam at will in search of everything he missed in real life.  One was bound in white with the picture of an African lion hunt on the front cover.  The other one had a plain brown binding.  Both had coloured illustrations and contained stories of hunting and travelling adventures in all sorts of out-of-the-way places.  There were tales of lion hunting with Arabs and tiger hunting in the jungles of India, of whaling in the Arctic and hair-breadth escapes from giant snakes in South America, of cruises in southern seas and caravaning across the high plateaus of Central Asia.

One story in particular stuck in his mind, and more particularly one little detail out of that story.  It was one of comparative repose and few sensational incidents relating the perfectly peaceful, but nevertheless strange and interesting experiences of a European traveller through some desert region back of the Caspian Sea.  Arriving at a nomad camp far away from all civilization, this traveller was met with touching hospitality.  During a formal visit to the chieftain of the tribe, he was offered tea.  With the tea was handed him a bowl containing a single lump of sugar.  In European fashion he picked up this and dropped it into his cup.  Not a word was said, but something told him that he had committed some dreadful mistake.  By and by, as he watched the others, he understood.  Sugar was so rare that to use it in ordinary fashion was out of question, and so the solitary lump served was meant to be licked in turn by each, and he, as the guest of honour, had been given the first chance.  To Keith’s mind that story seemed as clearly realized as if he had played a part in it himself.  And what occupied him more than anything else was the pitiful existence of those poor nomads to whom even such a common thing as sugar was an almost unattainable luxury.  It was his first lesson in human sympathy, and it was typical of his own existence and bent that it should have come out of a book.