56 THROUGH THE FIELDS WITH LINNAEUS 



Then the towns and cultivated lands bear so small a 

 proportion to the fells, forests, and barren plains (super- 

 ficially considered, a monotone of difficulty), which to- 

 gether comprise 3,123 Swedish square miles, leaving, 

 when we have deducted 429 Swedish miles for the lakes, 

 only an area of 247 square Swedish miles of meadow 

 and cultivated land. 1 One may travel for miles without 

 seeing a human being. 



Carl walked lightly on with the brisk step of a 

 youth who means to carve his own way to conquer the 

 world. He had to depend upon himself now. He was 

 happy, being filled with the great thoughts of what he 

 meant to do, and with that longing to name and define 

 things that marks the time of noontide in the mind. The 

 sweet fanciful vaguenesses of childhood's dawn having 

 vanished, with the dewdrops all about them dried, youth 

 is the hour when one really possesses one's pleasures, 

 instinctively realising happiness 



Yes, as I walk, I behold, in a luminous large intuition. 



His first day's journey took him through SmSland 

 with its shingle-roofed red houses and its red lichened 

 rocks, with juniper underwood, above which wave the 

 silver birches whisking the flowing streams lightly and 

 airily as does the line of a fly-fisher. The land was 

 fair, yet for nearly the first time in his life Carl's own 

 thoughts occupied him more than did external nature. 

 It is true he had made a long day of it : the butter- 

 flies had been asleep for hours. The white owl was 

 1 H. Marryat. 



