the boy's state of mind. Books of travel and adventure continued to
prevail for a long while. Equally favoured were stories dealing with
Norse Mythology and the heroic legends of his race. The grim record of
the Niebelungs was familiar to him at the age of eight, and the first
heroes of his worship were young Siegfried of divine aspect and Dietrich
of Bern, who seemed to the boy the final embodiment of worldly wisdom.
To these should be added Garibaldi, of whose South American campaigns,
so touchingly shared by the faithful Anita, he read graphic accounts in
an odd volume of an illustrated weekly. The word liberty first came to
him from the lips of the picturesque Italian, while Anita and the women
of the old Germanic sagas struck him by their contrast to his mother.

In the main, all his reading made for escape and compensation. He read
to get away from his own surroundings, and he revelled in characters of
fiction and legend and history that possessed qualities lacking in
himself. By nature he was a queer mixture of rashness and timidity, but
through his mother's anxiety on his behalf the latter quality was
constantly being nursed at the expense of all tendency to action. And
so, in order to keep the balance, he revelled in the imaginary or real
deeds of men whose very life-breath was danger. The more the books gave
him of what he craved, the less he thought of looking for it in life.

Consequently his new passion seemed a godsend to his mother, who
encouraged him in every possible way. It brought a solution of many
difficulties and worries by keeping him at home and quiet. The only
resistance came, as usual, from the father, who repeatedly counselled
moderation and often made the boy drop his book and turn to something
else--which seemed to Keith the worst of all the tyrannies to which he
found himself exposed. But most of the time the father was powerless
because of his absence from home, and soon Keith learned that his