On one house there was a balcony.  And just as the boy walked by, the doors were thrown open, and a yellow light streamed through the fine, sheer curtains.  Then a pretty young fru came out on the balcony and leaned over the railing.  “It’s raining; now we shall soon have spring,” said she.  When the boy saw her he felt a strange anxiety.  It was as though he wanted to weep.  For the first time he was a bit uneasy because he had shut himself out from the human kind.

Shortly after that he walked by a shop.  Outside the shop stood a red corn-drill.  He stopped and looked at it; and finally crawled up to the driver’s place, and seated himself.  When he had got there, he smacked with his lips and pretended that he sat and drove.  He thought what fun it would be to be permitted to drive such a pretty machine over a grainfield.  For a moment he forgot what he was like now; then he remembered it, and jumped down quickly from the machine.  Then a greater unrest came over him.  After all, human beings were very wonderful and clever.

He walked by the post-office, and then he thought of all the newspapers which came every day, with news from all the four corners of the earth.  He saw the apothecary’s shop and the doctor’s home, and he thought about the power of human beings, which was so great that they were able to battle with sickness and death.  He came to the church.  Then he thought how human beings had built it, that they might hear about another world than the one in which they lived, of God and the resurrection and eternal life.  And the longer he walked there, the better he liked human beings.

It is so with children that they never think any farther ahead than the length of their noses.  That which lies nearest them, they want promptly, without caring what it may cost them.  Nils Holgersson had not understood what he was losing when he chose to remain an elf; but now he began to be dreadfully afraid that, perhaps, he should never again get back to his right form.

How in all the world should he go to work in order to become human?  This he wanted, oh! so much, to know.

He crawled up on a doorstep, and seated himself in the pouring rain and meditated.  He sat there one whole hour—­two whole hours, and he thought so hard that his forehead lay in furrows; but he was none the wiser.  It seemed as though the thoughts only rolled round and round in his head.  The longer he sat there, the more impossible it seemed to him to find any solution.

“This thing is certainly much too difficult for one who has learned as little as I have,” he thought at last.  “It will probably wind up by my having to go back among human beings after all.  I must ask the minister and the doctor and the schoolmaster and others who are learned, and may know a cure for such things.”

This he concluded that he would do at once, and shook himself—­for he was as wet as a dog that has been in a water-pool.