This is not so strange. But is it not a most wonderful thing that just
because Umpl, from the falling of the Star was led to think, and make
his brain stronger and wiser than his mates, the result of it should
last so long that it made a leader of a boy more than a hundred years
after Umpl's day? Just think of it! Let us suppose that you were to
make up your mind that you would make the most of yourself; that, when
a quarrel began at school, before taking sides you would think
carefully over both sides, and make sure which was the right one, and
then fight for it your hardest, instead of taking up the side you
happened to hear about first; and because of your doing this every
day, and in every case that has two sides, just suppose that a boy
should live two hundred years from now, who would be your great-great-
great-great-grandson; who would be as like you as one pea is like
another, and who would grow up to be a great judge of the Supreme
Court, or perhaps President of the United States!

And yet, this is happening right along all around us! Just to think of
it every day makes me wonder, sometimes, what my thoughts yesterday
will have to do with my own many-times-great-grandson a hundred years
from now. Will he have reason to be glad or sorry?

But let us get back to Ulf.

Now and then in his Forest home he heard tales of a nation still
farther to the northwest; a race of wonderfully strong men who,
strange to say, had yellow hair and pink cheeks. They were also
terrible fighters, and no one could stand against them among all the
black or brown haired tribes. Just why a band of Northmen, as they
were called,--some dictionary makers spell it Norsemen,--should think