Leif Ericson lived about a thousand years ago. He and his men sailed across the ocean and landed in America five hundred years before Columbus discovered America, but he didn’t think much of the country, and when he went back to Norway he said little about it.

In later times there have been famous sailors and discoverers too in Norway. Men up there live so near the top of the earth that they have tried to go all the way to the top, to the point where if you stood still you would turn exactly around on the spot where you stood once every twenty-four hours. That point is the North Pole. Such men have risked their lives—and many have lost them—in trying to reach the poles. Two famous Scandinavian explorers, Nansen and Amundsen, tried—they didn’t lose their lives, but they didn’t reach the North Pole, either. An American named Peary was the first man to reach the North Pole. Amundsen, however, tried to reach the South Pole and he succeeded. He was the first man to reach the South Pole. Since then airplanes, and a Norse airship too, have crossed the North Pole, but they didn’t stop there. Later Amundsen started for the North Pole in an airplane and was never heard from again.

You have overshoes to wear when you go out in the snow, but every one in Norway and Sweden has a pair of long wooden runners called “skis,” which he straps to his shoes when he goes out. With these on his feet he coasts over the top of the snow, making a sled of himself—sliding down slopes and pushing himself along on level ground with a pole, as if it were a cane.

Have you ever seen a white blackbird? No one has. Have you ever seen white coal? They have a lot of it in Norway and Sweden.