"
Akka led the geese farther south to the great Skane plain. There it
spread, with grain fields; with acres and acres of sugar beets, where
the beet-pickers were at work; with low whitewashed farm- and outhouses;
with numberless little white churches; with ugly, gray sugar refineries
and small villages near the railway stations. Little beech-encircled
meadow lakes, each of them adorned by its own stately manor, shimmered
here and there.
"Now look down! Look carefully!" called the leader-goose. "Thus it is in
foreign lands, from the Baltic coast all the way down to the high Alps.
Farther than that I have never travelled."
When the goslings had seen the plain, the leader-goose flew down the
Oeresund coast. Swampy meadows sloped gradually toward the sea. In some
places were high, steep banks, in others drift-sand fields, where the
sand lay heaped in banks and hills. Fishing hamlets stood all along the
coast, with long rows of low, uniform brick houses, with a lighthouse at
the edge of the breakwater, and brown fishing nets hanging in the drying
yard.
"Now look down! Look well! This is how it looks along the coasts in
foreign lands."
After Akka had been flying about in this manner a long time she alighted
suddenly on a marsh in Vemminghoeg township and the boy could not help
thinking that she had travelled over Skane just to let him see that his
was a country which could compare favourably with any in the world.
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