wer than usual.

At last the boy just made himself cast one glance down to earth. Then he
thought that a great big rug lay spread beneath him, which was made up
of an incredible number of large and small checks.

"Where in all the world am I now?" he wondered.

He saw nothing but check upon check. Some were broad and ran crosswise,
and some were long and narrow--all over, there were angles and corners.
Nothing was round, and nothing was crooked.

"What kind of a big, checked cloth is this that I'm looking down on?"
said the boy to himself without expecting anyone to answer him.

But instantly the wild geese who flew about him called out: "Fields and
meadows. Fields and meadows."

Then he understood that the big, checked cloth he was travelling over
was the flat land of southern Sweden; and he began to comprehend why it
looked so checked and multi-coloured. The bright green checks he
recognised first; they were rye fields that had been sown in the fall,
and had kept themselves green under the winter snows. The yellowish-gray
checks were stubble-fields--the remains of the oat-crop which had grown
there the summer before. The brownish ones were old clover meadows: and
the black ones, deserted grazing lands or ploughed-up fallow pastures.
The brown checks with the yellow edges were, undoubtedly, beech-tree
forests; for in these you'll find the big trees which grow in the heart
of the forest--naked in winter; while the little beech-trees, which grow
along the borders, keep their dry, yellowed leaves way into the spring.
There were also dark checks with gray centres: these were the large,
built-up estates encircled by the small cottages with their blackening
straw roofs, and their stone-divided land-plots. And then there were
checks green in the middle with brown borders: these were the orchards,
where the grass-carpets were already turning green, although the trees
and bushes around them were still in their nude, brown bark.

The boy could not keep from laughing when he saw how checked everything
looked.

But when the wild geese heard him laugh, they called out--kind o'
reprovingly: "Fertile and good land. Fertile and good land."

The boy had already become serious. "To think that you can laugh; you,
who have met with the most terrible misfortune that can possibly happen
to a human being!" thought he. And for a moment he was pretty serious;
but it wasn't long before he was laughing again.

Now that he had grown so