The garden which surrounded the little one-storied house was very spacious. Long alleys with at least a hundred apple-trees and berry-bearing bushes crossed each other. Here and there were thick bowers of lilac and jasmine, and a huge aged oak still stood in a corner. There was plenty of shade and space, and enough decay to make the place romantic. East of the garden rose a gravel-hill covered with maples, beeches, and ash-trees; on the summit of it stood a temple belonging to the last century. The back of the hill had been dug away in parts in an unsuccessful attempt to take away gravel, but it had picturesque little dells filled with osier and thorn bushes. From this side neither the street nor the house was visible. From here one obtained a view over Bellevue, Cedardalsberg, and Lilljanskog. One saw only single scattered houses in the far distance, but on the other hand numberless gardens and drying-houses for tobacco.

Thus all the year round they enjoyed a country life, to which they had no objection. Now the boy could study at first-hand the beauty and secrets of plant life, and his first spring there was a period of wonderful surprises. When the freshly turned earth lay black under the apple-tree's white and pink canopy, when the tulips blazed in oriental pomp of colour, it seemed to him as he went about in the garden as if he were assisting at a solemnity more even than at the school examination, or in church, the Christmas festival itself not excepted.

But he had also plenty of hard bodily exercise. The boys were sent with ships' scrapers to clear the moss from the trees; they weeded the ground, swept the paths, watered and hoed. In the stable there was a cow with calves; the hay-loft became a swimming school where they sprang from the beams, and they rode the horses to water.

They had lively games on the hill, rolled down blocks of stone, climbed to the tops of the trees, and made expeditions. They explored the woods and bushes in the Haga Park, climbed up young trees in the ruins, caught bats, discovered edible wood-sorrel and ferns, and plundered birds' nests. Soon they laid their bows and arrows aside, discovered gunpowder, and shot little birds on the hills. They came to be somewhat uncivilised. They found school more distasteful and the streets more hateful than ever. Boys' books also helped in this process. Robinson Crusoe formed an epoch in his life; the Discovery of America, the Scalp-Hunter, and others aroused in him a sincere dislike of school-books.

During the long summer holidays their wildness increased so much that their mother could no longer control the unruly boys. As an experiment they were sent at first to the swimming school in Riddarholm, but it was so far that they wasted half the day on the road thither. Finally, their father resolved to send the three eldest to a boarding-school in the country, to spend the rest of the summer there.