n it began to move toward the south, like
everything else.

The boy saw all the coach doors open and the passengers step out while
both cars and people were moving southward.

He glanced away from the earth and tried to look straight ahead. Staring
at the queer railway train had made him dizzy; but after he had gazed
for a moment at a little white cloud, he was tired of that and looked
down again--thinking all the while that the eagle and himself were quite
still and that everything else was travelling on south. Fancy! Suppose
the grain field just then running along under him--which must have been
newly sown for he had seen a green blade on it--were to travel all the
way down to Skane where the rye was in full bloom at this season!

Up here the pine forests were different: the trees were bare, the
branches short and the needles were almost black. Many trees were bald
at the top and looked sickly. If a forest like that were to journey down
to Kolmarden and see a real forest, how inferior it would feel!

The gardens which he now saw had some pretty bushes, but no fruit trees
or lindens or chestnut trees--only mountain ash and birch. There were
some vegetable beds, but they were not as yet hoed or planted.

"If such an apology for a garden were to come trailing into Soermland,
the province of gardens, wouldn't it think itself a poor wilderness by
comparison?"

Imagine an immense plain like the one now gliding beneath him, coming
under the very eyes of the poor Smaland peasants! They would hurry away
from their meagre garden plots and stony fields, to begin plowing and
sowing.

There was one thing, however, of which this Northland had more than
other lands, and that was light. Night must have set in, for the cranes
stood sleeping on the morass; but it was as light as day. The sun had
not travelled southward, like every other thing. Instead, it had gone so
far north that it shone in the boy's face. To all appearance, it had no
notion of setting that night.

If this light and this sun were only shining on West Vemmenhoeg! It would
suit the boy's father and mother to a dot to have a working day that
lasted twenty-four hours.

_Sunday, June nineteenth_.

The boy raised his head and looked around, perfectly bewildered. It was
mighty queer! Here he lay sleeping in some place where he had not been
before. No, he had never seen this glen nor the mountains round about;
and never had he noticed such puny and shrunken birc