254 THROUGH THE FIELDS WITH LINNAEUS 



year), 1 as on May 17 Linnasus left Stenbrohult for 

 Loshult, and, skirting Lake Mockeln, he entered Sk&ne 

 by Getaback, following an altogether different line of 

 travel from his first journey, as a young student. 

 Skne, called the Garden of Sweden, is more like 

 Denmark with its pleasant cornfields and beech groves, 

 so different from the interminable stretches of birch 

 and pine in the more northern provinces. It has less of 

 an outlandish seeming to us Southerners, who find the 

 aspect of its villages homely with their white churches 

 and the frequent country-houses of the nobility and 

 the Swedish well-to-do. We cannot speak of wealth 

 in Sweden in our sense of the word, as their notion of 

 it is so different : a building the size of a parish church 

 is a Swedish cathedral ; so a village is a town, a town 

 a city, and so forth. They even exaggerate the size 

 of the country, vast as it is. The maps in the coffee- 

 room at Lund Stadshuset Hotel are simply stupendous. 

 SkSne looks as large as all Spain, and the general map 

 of Sweden and Norway is so complete that there seem 

 as many villages as there are inhabitants in the land. 

 1 Never,' said a young English lady traveller, ' did I 

 see anything more appallingly vast than the size of 

 Sweden on these maps. It seems as far to Wieslanda 

 as to England.' Our maps give a very different idea 

 of Sweden to what theirs do, and travelling by rail, 

 by its slowness, carries out their idea. We may well 



1 There is nothing bees love more than lime-blossoms ; Samuel 

 LinnEeus, often called the ' Bee-king,' was a great bee-fancier. 



