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 Enköping, 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 Enköping 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
Quite a gang of boys gathered daily about the big rock, generally on the farther side of it where they could not be seen from the house. Beyond the rock in that direction was nothing but an open field, and then the woods, rarely disturbed by a visitor. Thus they were really more safe than indoors as no one could approach them without being detected while still far away.
The two sons of the sexton were there, and a couple of boys from the city besides Keith, and three or four sons of neighbouring farmers. They ranged in ages from eight to eleven or twelve. Keith was the baby, but this was never held up against him. He was commonly treated as an equal, which raised his self-confidence tremendously, but it had also a somewhat embarrassing effect when the others seemed to take for granted that he knew as much as they concerning the matters that most occupied their minds--to judge by their talk at least.
The oldest of the lot, and their undisputed leader, was a peasant boy of remarkable ugliness, squint-eyed and snub-nosed, with tufts of yellow hair always falling over his face and several teeth missing. His clothes were in rags and he never wore shoes. He boasted of never washing unless "the old one" stood over him with a stick, and his language was worse than both his manners and his looks. An unbroken stream of profanity and obscenity poured from his rarely silent mouth, and he heaped withering scorn on any attempt at decent speech.