LUND UNIVERSITY 57 



blinking himself awake, the white ghost-moth, just 

 emerged from his chrysalis, was trying his yet moist 

 wing. At 9 P.M. the evening light reflected the banks 

 and trees in a white lake to the eastward on his left ; 

 the western sky was still suffused with buff and pale 

 pink when Carl entered Ousby, laden with specimens, 

 and made for one of the wooden houses, raised on 

 cyclopean stone foundations, where dwelt a brother 

 clergyman of his father's, who received him with hospi- 

 tality and a round lecture, such as he deemed good for 

 youth, and for this youth in particular. 



Off betimes, for Carl did not care for a second lec- 

 ture. He crossed the Helga by a ferry not across the 

 river itself, but further down in the pretty islanded 

 lake of Ousby. The landscape became more smiling 

 and commonplace. But there is natural history every- 

 where. From the rising ground at Hastveda he could 

 trace the great plain of Skne below him. This ridge 

 still looks like a devastated land, only peopled, appa- 

 rently, by one long-legged stork with white body and 

 black wings. This was of old the borderland between 

 the Swede and the Dane : henceforward to the coast 

 the people become more Danish. 



Carl would soon descend upon another world, a 

 world of level mediocrity so it seemed to him as he 

 looked down upon the reaches of distance without one 

 salient point. Should he too soon be lost in that ex- 

 panse, that waste? Dismal reflections in a boy are 

 generally a sign of its being dinner-time, and no dinner, 



