“Why, with my fur to be sure,” said the mole. “I prefer that to a piece of wash-leather.” (He laughed again as he said this, but Tommy Smith didn’t know what for.) “My fur, as you see, is smooth too. If you were to walk down one of my corridors, you would be surprised to find how hard and smooth the sides of it are. That is because I am always running up and down them, and rubbing them with my fur.”
“But doesn’t that make you very dirty?” said Tommy Smith. “Surely the earth must get into your fur and stay there.”
“It never stays there,” said the mole with great pride. “I have a very strong muscle which runs all along my back just under the skin, and when I twitch that, every little piece of mould or earth that is in my fur flies out of it again. There! now I have twitched it. Look at me and see how clean I am, although I have only just come out of the ground. Oh no; there is never anything in my coat! It is a saying in our family that a mole may live in the dirt, but he is never dirty.”
“That seems very funny,” said Tommy Smith. “But tell me some more about the fortress that you live in.”
“That is just what I was going to do,” said the mole, “but you ask so many questions, that I am not able to get on. Now I will begin again, and perhaps it would be better if you were to say nothing till I have done.”
So Tommy Smith sat down on the ground to listen, and the mole went on in these words:
“Inside my fortress there is a large room which is quite round. I call it my bedroom or dormitory, because sometimes I go to sleep there. There are two different ways of getting into it. One of them is by the floor, and that is easy. But the second way is by the ceiling, and that is much more difficult.”
“By the floor and the ceiling?” cried Tommy Smith, quite forgetting what the mole had said. “How very funny! I get into my room through a door in one of the sides.”
“Dear me!” said the mole. “Well, I should not like to enter a room in that way.”
“Why not?” asked Tommy Smith.