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All the hillside nodded approvingly. In a little glade half-way down the slope some newly-felled firs lay tumbled this way and that their red-blossomed tops were trembling still. On one of the stems a youth was seated. He was tall and slender, as the trees he had just felled. His hat swung on a twig, coat and waistcoat were hung on a withered branch.

There were hollyhocks round the walls, and many-coloured poppies, with many other shrubs and flowers. My eyes fell on one especially, a tall red-blossomed rushy kind of flower, that I had never seen before; and that seemed indeed to be something out of the common, for it stood in the middle of a little earth-plot, and had the whole bed nearly to itself.

Then he turned and went slowly up the stair, and came out on to the open face of that Isle, and he saw that it was waste indeed, and dreadful: a wilderness of black sand and stones and ice-borne rocks, with here and there a little grass growing in the hollows, and here and there a dreary mire where the white-tufted rushes shook in the wind, and here and there stretches of moss blended with red-blossomed sengreen; and otherwhere nought but the wind-bitten creeping willow clinging to the black sand, with a white bleached stick and a leaf or two, and again a stick and a leaf.

The hound fared on up the dale to where the water was bridged by a great fallen stone, and so over it and up a steep bent on the further side, on to a marvellously rough mountain-neck, whiles mere black sand cumbered with scattered rocks and stones, whiles beset with mires grown over with the cottony mire-grass; here and there a little scanty grass growing; otherwhere nought but dwarf willow ever dying ever growing, mingled with moss or red-blossomed sengreen; and all blending together into mere desolation.

How the people are dark as shadows, and their eyes flashing with light. And all the trees in the wood strained their ears to listen. The cuckoo perched in the red-blossomed pine, near the reddest cluster of all. "It may be as lovely as lovely can be," cuckooed he, "but nowhere does the heart throb with delight as in Finland forests in spring, and nowhere is such music in the air."