"I came just to say to you that the teacher is quite right, and that you roundly deserved your punishment."
"But Windekind said that the sun was our father."
"Yes, but it was not necessary to let anybody else know it. What have human beings to do with it? You must never speak of such delicate matters to them—they are too coarse. A human being is an astonishingly cruel and clumsy creature, who would prefer to seize and trample to death whatever came within his reach. We mice have had experience of that."
"But, Mousie, why do you stay in this neighborhood? Why do you not go far away—to the woods?"
"Alas! we cannot do that now. We are too much accustomed to town food. Provided one is prudent and always takes care to avoid their traps and their heavy feet, it becomes possible to endure human beings. Fortunately, we still retain our nimbleness. The worst of it is that human beings help out their own clumsiness by covenanting with the cat. That is a great calamity, but in the woods there are owls and hawks, and we should all certainly perish there. Now, Johannes, remember my advice. There comes the teacher!"
"Mousie, Mousie! Do not go away! Ask Windekind what I must do with my key. I have hung it around my neck, on my bare breast. But Saturday I have to take a bath, and I am so afraid somebody will see it. Tell me, Mousie dear, where I can safely hide it."
"In the ground—always in the ground. Everything is safest there. Shall I take, and keep it?"
"No, not here, at school!"
"Bury it then, out in the dunes. I will tell my cousin, the field-mouse, that he must keep watch of it."
"Thank you, Mousie."