The boy recalled what fun they had at home when the harvest wagons drawn by two sturdy horses, carried the grain from the field. The man who drove sat proudly on top of the load; the horses danced and pricked up their ears, while the village children, who were allowed to climb upon the sheaves, sat there laughing and shrieking, half-pleased, half-frightened. But here the great logs were drawn up and down steep hills; here the poor horses must be worked to their limit, and the driver must often be in peril. "I'm afraid there has been very little cheer along this road," the boy observed.
The eagle flew on with powerful wing strokes, and soon they came to a river bank covered with logs, chips, and bark. The eagle perceived that the boy wondered why it looked so littered up down there.
"Here the harvest has been stacked," the eagle told him.
The boy thought of how the grain stacks in his part of the country were piled up close to the farms, as if they were their greatest ornaments, while here the harvest was borne to a desolate river strand, and left there.
"I wonder if any one out in this wilderness counts his stacks, and compares them with his neighbour's?" he said.
A little later they came to Ljungen, a river which glides through a broad valley. Immediately everything was so changed that they might well think they had come to another country. The dark spruce forest had stopped on the inclines above the valley, and the slopes were clad in light-stemmed birches and aspens. The valley was so broad that in many places the river widened into lakes. Along the shores lay a large flourishing town.
As they soared above the valley the eagle realized that the boy was wondering if the fields and meadows here could provide a livelihood for so many people.
"Here live the reapers who mow the forest fields," the eagle said.
The boy was thinking of the lowly cabins and the hedged-in farms down in
Skåne when he exclaimed:
"Why, here the peasants live in real manors. It looks as if it might be worth one's while to work in the forest!"