During the morning Lasse and Pelle went out and inspected the property.
“It’ll be best if we go round it first; then you will see plainly where the boundary lies,” said Lasse, who knew that the dimensions of the place would be a surprise to Pelle. They wandered through heather and brambles and thorns, striking across the moorland and skirting precipitous slopes. It was several hours before they had finished their round.
“It’s an awfully large holding,” Pelle said again and again.
And Lasse answered proudly. “Yes, there’s nearly seventy acres here—if only it were all tilled!”
It was virgin soil, but it was overrun with heather and juniper- scrub, through which brambles and honeysuckle twined their way. Halfway up a perpendicular wall of rock hung the ash and the wild cherry, gripping the bare cliff with roots that looked like crippled hands. Crab-apple trees, sloe-bushes and wild rose-briars made an impenetrable jungle, which already bore traces of Lasse’s exertions. And in the midst of this luxuriant growth the rocky subsoil protruded its grim features, or came so near the surface that the sun had scorched the roots of the herbage.
“That’s a proper little Paradise,” said Lasse; “you can scarcely set foot in it without treading on the berries. But it’s got to be turned into arable if one is to live here.”
“Isn’t the soil rather middling?” said Pelle.
“Middling—when all that can grow and flourish there?” Lasse pointed to where birch and aspen stood waving their shining foliage to and fro in the breeze. “No, but it’ll be a damned rough bit of work to get it ready for ploughing; I’m sorry now that you aren’t at home.”
Lasse had several times made this allusion, but Pelle was deaf to it. All this was not what he had imagined; he felt no desire to play the landowner’s son at home in the way Lasse had in mind.
“It’ll be trouble enough here to manage about your daily bread,” he said, with remarkable precocity.