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There were other boys ... and they knew where birds lived! "Listen, Trientje," said Lowietje. "You stay here with Poentje: I'll come back at once and bring your pinafore full of birds' eggs ... and young ones." He fetched out his climbing-cord and, in a flash, all the boys were gone, behind the trees.
Trientje opened her basket and they ate up all their bread-and-butter. Near them, in the grass, ants crept in and out of a little hole. Lowietje poked with a stick and the whole nest came crawling out. The children sat looking to see all those beasties swarm about and run away with their eggs.
Round the children's ears hummed big fat bees, buzzing from flower to flower. When the bank was stripped, they went deeper into the wood, Lowietje going ahead to show the way. They crept through the trees where it twilighted and where the sun played so prettily with little golden arrows in the leafage; from there they came into the high pine-wood. Look, look!
It was ... but no, they were sitting there too glumly! I went up to them and, after all, knew them for Sarelke and Lowietje, the village-constable's children. They sat with their legs in the ditch, their elbows on their knees, earnestly chatting. I sat down beside them, but they did not even look up, did not notice me.
The children sat nestling into each other's arms Poentje down under the other two and only when it had kept still for long did they all, trembling and terrified, dare to put out their heads. "I wish we were home now!" sighed Lowietje. Once more the sky was all on fire and rumbling and breaking and crackling till the earth quaked and shook.
The boys had only just seen him and, on every side, they came scrambling out of the tree-tops, slid down the trunks and darted into the underwood. Breathless, bewildered and scared to death, Lowietje came to his sister and, with his two hands, held the rents of his trousers together: "There were eight eggs there, Trientje, but the keeper came and, in the sliding, my trousers...."
I, who was all for sport and child's-play, now found my own chums so altered; and they no longer knew me. I would have liked to shout, to grip them hard by the shoulder and call out that it was I: I, I, I! But I durst not, or could not. "There comes the keeper," droned Sarelke. Lowietje looked down the drove with his great glassy eyes. The two boys stood up and, without speaking, shuffled away.
It must be day then! And this awful night was past! All my dismay was gone and a bold feeling came over me, something like the feeling of gladness that follows on a solved problem. I would make Lowietje and Sarelke and all the boys at school hark to my tale, that I would! I had slept a whole night alone in the loft! And the rats! And the ghosts! Ooh! And not a whit afraid!
All three stood up and went past the old mill, then through the meadow and so, at last, they came to the wood and into the cool shade. On the banks of the deep, hollowed path, it all stood thick as hail and black with the brambleberries. Lowietje picked, never stopped picking, and put them one by one in his mouth; and his nose and cheeks were smeared with red, like blood.
The wind came up, the branches rocked and writhed and the leaves fluttered and tugged and heavy drops beat into the sand. "Quick, quick!" said Trientje. "It's going to lighten!" Lowietje said nothing and Poentje cried. Each took the child by one hand and they ran as fast as they could to get from under the trees. "Ooh! Ooh!"
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