“Have animals really intelligence?” asked Ellen, in surprise. “You really believe that they think about things just as we do?”
It was nothing new to Sister; she talked every day to the fowls and rabbits, and knew how wise they were.
“I wonder if flowers can think too,” said Lasse Frederik. He was busy drawing a flower from memory, and it would look like a face: hence the remark.
Pelle thought they could.
“No, no, Pelle!” said Ellen. “You’re going too far now! It’s only us people who can think.”
“They can feel at any rate, and that’s thinking in a way, I suppose, only with the heart. They notice at once if you’re fond of them; if you aren’t they don’t thrive.”
“Yes, I do believe that, for if you’re fond of them you take good care of them,” said the incorrigible Ellen.
“I’m not so sure of that,” said Pelle, looking at her teasingly. “You’re very fond of your balsam, but a gardener would be sure to tell you that you treat it like a cabbage. And look how industriously it flowers all the same. They answer kind thoughts with gratitude, and that’s a nice way of thinking. Intelligence isn’t perhaps worth as much as we human beings imagine it to be. You yourself think with your heart, little mother.” It was his pet name for her just now.
After a little interlude such as this, they went on with their work. Pelle had to tell Sister all about the animals in her alphabet-book— about the useful cow and the hare that licked the dew off the clover and leaped up under the very nose of the cowherd. In the winter it went into the garden, gnawed the bark off the young trees and ate the farmer’s wife’s cabbage. “Yes, I must acknowledge that,” Ellen interposed, and then they all laughed, for puss had just eaten her kail.
Then the child suddenly left the subject, and wanted to know whether there had always, always been a Copenhagen. Pelle came to a standstill for a moment, but by a happy inspiration dug Bishop Absalom out of his memory. He took the opportunity of telling them that the capital had a population of half a million.