The following day the boy travelled over Haelsingland. It spread beneath
him with new, pale-green shoots on the pine trees, new birch leaves in
the groves, new green grass in the meadows, and sprouting grain in the
fields. It was a mountainous country, but directly through it ran a
broad, light valley from either side of which branched other
valleys--some short and narrow, some broad and long.
"This land resembles a leaf," thought the boy, "for it's as green as a
leaf, and the valleys subdivide it in about the same way as the veins of
a leaf are foliated."
The branch valleys, like the main one, were filled with lakes, rivers,
farms, and villages. They snuggled, light and smiling, between the dark
mountains until they were gradually squeezed together by the hills.
There they were so narrow that they could not hold more than a little
brook.
On the high land between the valleys there were pine forests which had
no even ground to grow upon. There were mountains standing all about,
and the forest covered the whole, like a woolly hide stretched over a
bony body.
It was a picturesque country to look down upon, and the boy saw a good
deal of it, because the eagle was trying to find the old fiddler,
Clement Larsson, and flew from ravine to ravine looking for him.
A little later in the morning there was life and movement on every farm.
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