lands beyond thinned and finally vanished and the broad, open
sea came clear up to firm land. Here there were no more forests: here
the plain was supreme. It spread all the way to the horizon. A land that
lay so exposed, with field upon field, reminded the boy of Skane. He
felt both happy and sad as he looked at it.

"I can't be very far from home," he thought.

Many times during the trip the goslings had asked the old geese:

"How does it look in foreign lands?"

"Wait, wait! You shall soon see," the old geese had answered.

When the wild geese had passed Halland Ridge and gone a distance into
Skane, Akka called out:

"Now look down! Look all around! It is like this in foreign lands."

Just then they flew over Soeder Ridge. The whole long range of hills was
clad in beech woods, and beautiful, turreted castles peeped out here and
there.

Among the trees grazed roe-buck, and on the forest meadow romped the
hares. Hunters' horns sounded from the forests; the loud baying of dogs
could be heard all the way up to the wild geese. Broad avenues wound
through the trees and on these ladies and gentlemen were driving in
polished carriages or riding fine horses. At the foot of the ridge lay
Ring Lake with the ancient Bosjoe Cloister on a narrow peninsula.

"Does it look like this in foreign lands?" asked the goslings.

"It looks exactly like this wherever there are forest-clad ridges,"
replied Akka, "only one doesn't see many of them. Wait! You shall see
how it looks in general."

Akka led the geese farther south to the great Skane plain. There it
spread, with grain fields; with acres and acres of sugar beets, where
the beet-pickers were at work; with low whitewashed farm- and outhouses;
with numberless little white churches; with ugly, gray sugar refineries
and small villages near the railway stations. Little beech-encircled
meadow lakes, each of them adorned by its own stately manor, shimmered
here and there.

"Now look down! Look carefully!" called the leader-goose. "Thus it is in
foreign lands, from the Baltic coast all the way down to the high Alps.
Farther than that I have never travelled."

When the goslings had seen the plain, the leader-goose flew down the
Oeresund coast. Swampy meadows sloped gradually toward the sea. In some
places were high, steep banks, in others drift-sand fields, where the
sand lay heaped in banks and hills. Fishing hamlets stood all along the
coast, with long rows of low, uniform bri