bber and bird-eater, and wondered if I should be doing right
in letting loose such a plunderer, and if it were not better, perhaps,
to let him stay where he was. What say you, Mother Akka? Was it right
to think thus?"

"No, it was not right!" retorted Akka. "Say what you will about the
eagles, they are proud birds and greater lovers of freedom than all
others. It is not right to keep them in captivity. Do you know what I
would suggest? This: that, as soon as you are well rested, we two make
the trip together to the big bird prison, and liberate Gorgo."

"That is just the word I was expecting from you, Mother Akka," returned
the boy eagerly.

"There are those who say that you no longer have any love in your heart
for the one you reared so tenderly, because he lives as eagles must
live. But I know now that it isn't true. And now I want to see if
Morten Goosey-Gander is awake.

"Meanwhile, if you wish to say a 'thank you' to the one who brought me
here to you, I think you'll find him up there on the cliff ledge, where
once you found a helpless eaglet."

OSA, THE GOOSE GIRL, AND LITTLE MATS

The year that Nils Holgersson travelled with the wild geese everybody
was talking about two little children, a boy and a girl, who tramped
through the country. They were from Sunnerbo township, in Smaland, and
had once lived with their parents and four brothers and sisters in a
little cabin on the heath.

While the two children, Osa and Mats, were still small, a poor, homeless
woman came to their cabin one night and begged for shelter. Although the
place could hardly hold the family, she was taken in and the mother
spread a bed for her on the floor. In the night she coughed so hard that
the children fancied the house shook. By morning she was too ill to
continue her wanderings. The children's father and mother were as kind
to her as could be. They gave up their bed to her and slept on the
floor, while the father went to the doctor and brought her medicine.

The first few days the sick woman behaved like a savage; she demanded
constant attention and never uttered a word of thanks. Later she became
more subdued and finally begged to be carried out to the heath and left
there to die.

When her hosts would not hear of this, she told them that the last few
years she had roamed about with a band of gipsies. She herself was not
of gipsy blood, but was the daughter of a well-to-do farmer. She had run
away from home and gone with