“What is the carnival?” she asked Gerda one evening in late November, when the last of the friends had clattered down the stairs, and the two little girls were sitting beside the tall porcelain stove which filled the room with a comfortable heat.  “I have heard you all talking about it for days; but I don’t know just what it is.”

“It is a day for winter sports, and all kinds of fun, and you shall sit in the casino at the Deer Park and see it for yourself,” said Gerda, giving Karen a loving hug.

When the day of the carnival arrived at last, and Karen sat in the casino, cosily wrapped in furs, and looked out over the Djurgard, she knew that she had never dreamed of so much fun and beauty.

There had been heavy hoar frosts for several nights, and the trees had become perfectly white,—­the pines standing straight as powdered sentinels, the birches bending under their silvery covering like frozen fountains of spray.  The ice was covered with skaters, their sharp steel shoes flashing in the sun, their merry laughter ringing out in the cold, crisp air.

It seemed as if everyone in Stockholm were skating, or snow-shoeing, or skimming over the fields of snow on long skis.  Even Fru Ekman, after making Karen comfortable in the casino, strapped a pair of skates on her own feet and astonished the little girl with the wonderful circles and figures she could cut on the ice.

There was no place for beginners in such a company.  And indeed, it almost seemed as if Swedish boys and girls could skate without beginning, for many little children were darting about among the crowds of grown people.

Of course Karen’s eyes were fixed most often upon the twins, and as they chased each other over the hurdles, or wound in and out among the sail-skaters and long lines of merry-makers, for the first time in her life she had a feeling of envy.

When Gerda left the skaters at last, to sit for a while beside her friend, she saw at once the thought that was in Karen’s mind.  So, instead of speaking about the fun of skating, she began to talk about the doctor’s promise that the lame back would be entirely cured before summer.

“And there is really just as much fun in the summer-time,” she said, “for then we can swim, and bathe, and row boats on the lake.  You can go to Raettvik with us, too, and then you shall dance and be gayer than any one else.”

“Oh, see, there are some men on skis!” cried Karen suddenly, forgetting her feeling of envy in watching the wonderful speed made by the party of ski-runners who came into sight on the crest of the long hill opposite the ice-basin.

The skis, or snow-skates, are a pair of thin strips of hard wood about four inches wide and eight or nine feet long, pointed and curved upward in front.  The snow-skater binds one on each foot and glides over the snowy fields, or coasts down the hills as easily as if he were on a toboggan.