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Without thinking, he lifted the wooden hat from his head and shouted: "I take off my hat to the one who chose the harbour and founded the shipyard and recreated the navy; to the monarch who has awakened all this into life!" "Thanks, Rosenbom! That was well spoken. Rosenbom is a fine man. But what is this, Rosenbom?" For there stood Nils Holgersson, right on the top of Rosenbom's bald pate.
While he still stood and stared after them, the wild geese flew up from the church tower, and swayed back and forth over the city. Instantly they caught sight of Nils Holgersson; and then the big white one darted down from the sky and fetched him. Sunday, April third. The wild geese went out on a wooded island to feed.
He heard their call a couple of times more, then it died away. "Well, now you'll have to get along by yourself, Nils Holgersson," he said to himself. "Now you must prove whether you have learned anything during these weeks in the open."
It wasn't fair to say that Osa, the goose-girl, had annoyed him. She was much too wise for that. But the one who could be aggravating with a vengeance was her brother, little Mats. "Have you heard, Nils Goose-boy, how it went when Småland and Skåne were created?" he would ask, and if Nils Holgersson said no, he began immediately to relate the old joke-legend.
At the time when Nils Holgersson wandered around with the wild geese, there were no human beings in Glimminge castle; but for all that, it was not without inhabitants. Every summer there lived a stork couple in a large nest on the roof.
Then little Mats was silent; and if Nils Holgersson had also kept still, all would have gone well; but he couldn't possibly refrain from asking how Saint Peter had succeeded in creating the Skåninge. "Well, what do you think yourself?" said little Mats, and looked so scornful that Nils Holgersson threw himself upon him, to thrash him.
In the morning Nils Holgersson had dropped one of his wooden shoes, so he went down by the elms and birches that grew along the shore, to look for something to bind around his foot. The boy walked quite a distance before he found anything that he could use. He glanced about nervously, for he did not fancy being in the forest. "Give me the plains and the lakes!" he thought.
It is as if some one were to come and tell you that henceforth the air would always be still on the plain, and the wind would never more dance across it with blustering breezes and drenching showers. He who fancies that Ysätter-Kaisa is dead and gone may as well hear what occurred in Närke the year that Nils Holgersson travelled over that part of the country.
As the boy gazed at the broad, endless sea and the red evening sun, which had such a kindly glow that he dared to look straight at it, he felt a sense of peace and calm penetrate his soul. "It's not worth while to be sad, Nils Holgersson," said the Sun. "This is a beautiful world to live in both for big and little.
Nils Holgersson had not been happy over the delay in Westergötland. He had tried to keep a stout heart; but it was hard for him to reconcile himself to his fate. "If I were only well out of Skåne and in some foreign land," he had thought, "I should know for certain that I had nothing to hope for, and would feel easier in my mind."
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