The Wonderful Adventures of Nils | Page 6

taste how it felt when you threw your wooden shoes at me, as you did last summer!" bawled Star.
"Come here, and you shall be repaid for that wasp you let loose in my ear!" growled Gold Lily.
Mayrose was the oldest and the wisest of them, and she was the very maddest. "Come here!" said she, "that I may pay you back for the many times that you have jerked the milk pail away from your mother; and for all the snares you laid for her, when she came carrying the milk pails; and for all the tears when she has stood here and wept over you!"
The boy wanted to tell them how he regretted that he had been unkind to them; and that never, never--from now on--should he be anything but good, if they would only tell him where the elf was. But the cows didn't listen to him. They made such a racket that he began to fear one of them would succeed in breaking loose; and he thought that the best thing for him to do was to go quietly away from the cowhouse.
When he came out, he was thoroughly disheartened. He could understand that no one on the place wanted to help him find the elf. And little good would it do him, probably, if the elf were found.
He crawled up on the broad hedge which fenced in the farm, and which was overgrown with briers and lichen. There he sat down to think about how it would go with him, if he never became a human being again. When father and mother came home from church, there would be a surprise for them. Yes, a surprise--it would be all over the land; and people would come flocking from East Vemmingh?g, and from Torp, and from Skerup. The whole Vemmingh?g township would come to stare at him. Perhaps father and mother would take him with them, and show him at the market place in Kivik.
No, that was too horrible to think about. He would rather that no human being should ever see him again.
His unhappiness was simply frightful! No one in all the world was so unhappy as he. He was no longer a human being--but a freak.
Little by little he began to comprehend what it meant--to be no longer human. He was separated from everything now; he could no longer play with other boys, he could not take charge of the farm after his parents were gone; and certainly no girl would think of marrying him.
He sat and looked at his home. It was a little log house, which lay as if it had been crushed down to earth, under the high, sloping roof. The outhouses were also small; and the patches of ground were so narrow that a horse could barely turn around on them. But little and poor though the place was, it was much too good for him now. He couldn't ask for any better place than a hole under the stable floor.
It was wondrously beautiful weather! It budded, and it rippled, and it murmured, and it twittered--all around him. But he sat there with such a heavy sorrow. He should never be happy any more about anything.
Never had he seen the skies as blue as they were to-day. Birds of passage came on their travels. They came from foreign lands, and had travelled over the East sea, by way of Smygahuk, and were now on their way North. They were of many different kinds; but he was only familiar with the wild geese, who came flying in two long rows, which met at an angle.
Several flocks of wild geese had already flown by. They flew very high, still he could hear how they shrieked: "To the hills! Now we're off to the hills!"
When the wild geese saw the tame geese, who walked about the farm, they sank nearer the earth, and called: "Come along! Come along! We're off to the hills!"
The tame geese could not resist the temptation to raise their heads and listen, but they answered very sensibly: "We're pretty well off where we are. We're pretty well off where we are."
It was, as we have said, an uncommonly fine day, with an atmosphere that it must have been a real delight to fly in, so light and bracing. And with each new wild geese-flock that flew by, the tame geese became more and more unruly. A couple of times they flapped their wings, as if they had half a mind to fly along. But then an old mother-goose would always say to them: "Now don't be silly. Those creatures will have to suffer both hunger and cold."
There was a young gander whom the wild geese had fired with a passion for adventure. "If another flock comes this way, I'll follow