Pelle knew every mouse-hole in the meadow, and they lay down and examined them carefully. “Here’s one that has mice in it,” said Rud. “Look, here’s their dunghill!”
“Yes, that smells of mouse,” said Pelle, putting his nose to the hole. “And the blades of grass turn outward, so the old ones must be out.”
With Pelle’s knife they cut away the turf, and set to work eagerly to dig with two pieces of pot. The soil flew about their heads as they talked and laughed.
“My word, how fast we’re getting on!”
“Yes; Ström couldn’t work as fast!” Ström was a famous worker who got twenty-five öres a day more than other autumn farm-hands, and his example was used as an incentive to coax work out of the laborers.
“We shall soon get right into the inside of the earth.”
“Well, but it’s burning hot in there.”
“Oh, nonsense: is it?” Pelle paused doubtfully in his digging.
“Yes, the schoolmaster says so.”
The boys hesitated and put their hands down into the hole. Yes, it was warm at the bottom—so warm that Pelle found it necessary to pull out his hand and say: “Oh, my word!” They considered a little, and then went on scraping out the hole as carefully as if their lives depended on it. In a little while straw appeared in the passage, and in a moment the internal heat of the earth was forgotten. In less than a minute they had uncovered the nest, and laid the little pink, new-born mice out on the grass. They looked like half-hatched birds.