top of the island, lies an open place called Great Square, which used to
play a most important part in Swedish history, but which now serves no
better purpose than to house the open-air toy market that operates the
last week before Christmas.

Long narrow streets loop concentrically about Great Square. They are
lined with massive structures of stone and brick, four and five stories
high, that used to be the homes of court and government officials, of
army and navy officers, of burghers made prosperous by an extensive
domestic and foreign trade, while on the ground floors were located the
choicest shops of the country's capital. The shops are still there, but
they have grown dingy and cheap, and they administer only to the casual
needs of the humble middle-class people crowded into the old-fashioned,
gloomy apartments above.

From the square to the water-fronts radiate a number of still more
narrow and squalid lanes, harbouring a population which is held inferior
to that of the streets in social rank without yet being willing to have
itself classed with the manual toilers of the suburbs. Halfway down the
slope of such a lane, and almost within the shadow of the palace, stood
the house where Keith first arrived at some sort of consciousness of
himself and the surrounding world.

On the fourth floor his parents occupied a three-room flat. The parlour
and the living-room had two windows each, looking into the lane. The
kitchen in the rear opened a single window on the narrowest, barest,
darkest courtyard you ever saw, its one redeeming feature being a
glimpse of sky above the red-tiled roof of the building opposite.

In such surroundings Keith spent the better part of his first sixteen