"Oh dear," sighed Gerda, gathering up her treasures, "here's the end of our long journey over the wonderful canal!"
But Erik looked down the river to the tall chimneys of the iron-works and said to himself, "And here's the beginning of my work in the world."
CHAPTER XII
A WINTER CARNIVAL
"Abroad is good but home is better," quoted Birger, as the railroad train whizzed across the country, bearing the twins toward home once more after four happy days of sight-seeing in Göteborg.
"Vacation will soon be over and we shall be back again in our dear old school," exclaimed Gerda, with a comical expression on her face.
"I feel as if we had been going to the best kind of a school all summer," said her brother, looking out of the window at the broad fields and little red farmhouses cuddling down in the green landscape. "We have been learning about the largest cities, and the canals and railroads, the lakes and rivers, and that is what we have to do when we study geography in school."
"If I ever make a geography," and Gerda gave a great sigh, "I shall have nothing but pictures in it. That is the way the real earth looks outside of the geographies. There are just millions and millions of pictures fitted together, and not a single word said about them."
Birger laughed. "I will study your geography," he said, "if I am not too busy making one of my own."
"What kind of a geography shall you make?" asked Gerda.