Christmas was approaching. The days grew shorter and shorter, until at last a scant four hours of daylight remained around noon. Even then a lamp was often needed for reading. The lead-coloured sky nearly touched the roofs. The drizzle that filled the air most of the time seemed to enter men's minds, too, sapping their vigour until life became a burden. Meeting on the streets, they would cry in irritable tones: "When will the snow come?" It was always a tedious time for Keith. The incident with Harald made it worse this year. Except for the daily attendance at school, he was virtually a prisoner. Johan was to be seen only from the window, whence Keith enviously watched him prowling about the lane, his hands buried in the side-pockets of an old coat much too long--apparently inherited from someone else--and his shoulders hunched as if fore-destined to support loads of wood like those his father used to carry. If no one was in the living-room, Keith might shout a greeting to his playmate below, but it was not much fun, and Johan had a contemptuous way of asking why he did not come out and play. Yet the season was not without its compensations. Stores of every kind were laid in to last through the winter. One might have thought that a severance of communications with the outside world was feared. Keith marvelled at the magnificence of it, and once in a while he asked why it had to be done. The answers were unsatisfactory. The main reason was that it had always been done, but he gathered also that, while it was perfectly respectable to live from day to day during the summer, to do so during the winter would be a distinct proof of social and economic inferiority. The fire wood came first--a mighty load of birch logs piled along the house front in the lane. Two men were busy all day with saw and ax, reducing those logs into pieces matching the fire-places in the kitchen stove and the two glazed brick ovens in the living-room and the parlour. Two more men piled the pieces into huge sacks and staggered with those on their backs up the five flights of stairs to the top garret under the peak of the house, which belonged to the Wellanders. 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. Cheese was more than a taste with Keith's father. It was a hobby, and one of his few pastimes was to skirmish in strange little shops for some particularly old and strong-smelling piece at a reasonable price. When he brought home a bargain of that kind, he acted like a bibliophile having just captured a rare first edition for a song, and the mother tried hard to share his enthusiasm. But, she said once, she had to draw the line at cheese that walked by itself. Half in jest and half in earnest, the father maintained that the maggots were the very essence of the cheese, and that to remove them was to lose the finest flavour. This year the father had bought a whole fresh cheese in order to age it at home and thus save money in two ways, the price being proportionate to the age. The same large-handed system prevailed in other things, though the parents often spoke of their poverty, and though their resources undoubtedly were very limited. Shirts, table-ware, bed-linen, china, etc., must needs be acquired in round numbers. To have less than a dozen of anything was to have nothing at all. The breaking of a cup was a family disaster if it could not be replaced. Everything had to be in sets, and to preserve these intact, the utmost care was preached and exercised. It bred thrift and orderliness, but also an undue regard for property. Finally came the time for baking and other direct preparations for a holiday season that in the good old days used to last from Christmas Eve to January 13th known as the Twentieth Christmas Day, when everybody "danced the Yule out." What interested Keith most in this part of the proceedings was the making of gingersnaps according to a recipe transmitted to his mother from bygone generations and cherished by her as a precious family secret. A whole day was set aside for the purpose and at the end of it they had a big, bulging earthen jar filled to the brim. Keith used to boast to other children of those dainties that, in addition to their taste, had the fascination of many different shapes--hearts, crowns, lilies, clubs, diamonds, baskets, and so on. They really deserved all the praise they got, and he had so little to boast of on the whole. The jar stood on the floor in the pantry back of the parlour, and once in a while Keith found his way to it without maternal permission, although, as a rule, he was little given to lawbreaking. One morning three or four days before Christmas Lena was heard calling from the kitchen: "Keith, Keith, come and look!" Eager as always when the slightest excitement was promised, the boy started so suddenly that his little table was upset with its whole population of tin soldiers and his mother was moved to remark that "it was no use behaving as if the house were on fire." "Look at the snow," said Lena, pointing to the window when Keith reached the kitchen, relieved at not having had to pick up the spilled toys before he could go. Huge, wet, feathery flakes were dropping lazily from the sky. Little by little they increased in numbers and fell more quickly. At last they formed a moving veil through which the building at the other end of the courtyard could barely be seen. Later in the day Keith was permitted to look out through one of the front windows. The whole world had changed and looked much brighter in spite of the failing light. The Quay was covered by a carpet of white that made the waters beyond look doubly dark and cold. The trees on the opposite shore looked as if they had been painted from the topmost twig to the root. Down in the lane, two of the workers in the distillery were pelting each other with snowballs while a third one was shouting at the top of his voice: "We'll have a white Christmas this year, thank heaven." That same evening Keith's long cherished dream of visiting the open-air Christmas Fair at Great Square was to come true at last. Like other affairs of its kind, it had been reduced by the modern shop to a mere shadow of its former glorious self, and it was kept up only out of regard for ancient tradition. Keith had been told that it was nothing but a lot of open booths displaying cheap toys and cheaper candy. To Keith toys were toys and candy candy, no matter what the price and quality, and so he kept on begging leave to go, until the night in question his parents, who were going out with friends, deemed it better to let him see for himself. And so Lena was ordered to take charge of the expedition. Lena and Keith were dressed and ready to start when the mother came into the kitchen to give the boy a farewell kiss as usual. He was in high spirits, but fidgety with some unexpressed wish. "What is it, Keith," asked the mother, recognizing the symptoms. "I want some money," he whispered into her ear. "Go and ask papa." "No, you ask him." That was what always happened, and in the end the mother voiced the boy's plea to the father, who just then appeared in the door to the living-room. He was in a good humour and promptly reached into his pocket. Unfortunately Keith discovered at that crucial moment that one of his shoe laces had become untied. "Please, mamma, help me," he said, putting his foot on a chair to enable her to reach it more easily. "That settles it," exclaimed the father with a darkening face as he handed Keith a few small copper coins. "That is all you will get now. A boy of five who makes his mother tie his shoe strings ought not to have anything at all." Keith took the coins silently and went with Lena to the fair, but he saw nothing worth seeing, and he never wanted to go again. Uneasily he prowled among the booths trying as a matter of duty to find something so cheap that his scant hoard would buy it. At last he succeeded in getting a little box of tin soldiers of poorest quality for one-third less than the price put on it It was one of the few times in his life when he found himself able to haggle over the cost of a thing. From the first he found fault with the new addition to his army, and one day not long afterwards he charged the whole regiment with cowardice in the face of the enemy. A drumhead court martial was held on the spot, and the verdict was a foregone conclusion. The culprits were found guilty in a body and sentenced to immediate execution. Then Keith possessed himself surreptitiously of the family hammer, and when his mother came to investigate the noise he was making the whole offensive regiment had been reduced to scraps. Never before or after did Keith as a general go to such extremes on behalf of military morale. But many, many years later, when he stopped for the first time at a typical English hotel, he found himself horribly embarrassed by the assistance forced on him by the obligatory valet.