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"The Vikings had no such easy way as this of getting from Lake Mälar out into the Baltic Sea," said Lieutenant Ekman, coming up to find the children, and helping himself generously to the kringlor. Gerda looked at the gnarled and sturdy oaks that lined the banks of the canal like watchful sentinels. "The Vikings must have loved the lakes and bays of the Northland," she said.
The twins told Karen about finding her brother, and the reindeer, and the midnight sun, and the logs in the river, all in one breath; while Lieutenant Ekman explained Josef's accident to the lighthouse keeper and his wife, who had both hurried down to the wharf to find out the meaning of the return of the government boat.
There is the pickled herring your father sent us, and the smoked reindeer from Erik's father in Lapland; and Grandmother Ekman sent us strawberry jam, and raspberry preserve, and cheese, and oh, so many goodies!" Gerda clapped her hands so hard that some of the water she was carrying to her plants was spilled on the floor. "Oh, dear me!" she sighed, "there is something more for me to do.
Then from one pocket and another he took boxes of matches of all sizes and kinds, each time naming the town where they were manufactured; while the twins and their father gazed at him in surprise. "But why so many matches?" asked Lieutenant Ekman, when at last the supply seemed to be exhausted. "You have matches enough there to light the whole world."
Lieutenant Ekman and his wife sorted them out and placed them in neat piles on the table in the center of the room, stopping now and then to laugh softly at the verses which they had written for the gifts. "Will the daylight never end!" sighed Gerda, looking out at the red and yellow sky which told that sunset was near. Then she tied a new blue ribbon on her hair and ran to help Karen.
"Who ever heard of bringing a Lapp boy to Stockholm!" exclaimed Herr Ekman; and his wife added, "Who but Gerda would think of bringing a strange child here, to be cured of her lameness?" It was in the Djurgård that poor Erik first learned that he was a Lapp, a dirty Lapp.
Seldom is there gathered together a company of finer men and women, boys and girls, than Karen saw before her. Descendants of the Vikings these were, golden-haired, keen-eyed and crimson-cheeked. "Look at that great fellow, taller than all the others," Fru Ekman whispered to Karen. "He is the champion figure-skater of Europe."
There they lay, side by side, in the same blue-painted cradle that had rocked the Ekman babies for over two hundred years; and one looked so exactly like the other that even dear Grandmother Ekman could not tell them apart.
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