Amid all the objects in motion there was only one that stood still:  that was a railway train.  It stood directly under them, for it was with the train as with Gorgo—­it could not move from the spot.  The locomotive sent forth smoke and sparks.  The clatter of the wheels could be heard all the way up to the boy, but the train did not seem to move.  The forests rushed by; the flag station rushed by; fences and telegraph poles rushed by; but the train stood still.  A broad river with a long bridge came toward it, but the river and the bridge glided along under the train with perfect ease.  Finally a railway station appeared.  The station master stood on the platform with his red flag, and moved slowly toward the train.

When he waved his little flag, the locomotive belched even darker smoke curls than before, and whistled mournfully because it had to stand still.  All of a sudden 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.