In the wood, everything was still: the trees stood firmly in the blaze of the sun and the young leaves hung gleaming, without stirring. A bird sat very deep down whistling and its song rang out as in a great church. Turtle-doves cooed far away. Round the children’s ears hummed big fat bees, buzzing from flower to flower. When the bank was stripped, they went deeper into the wood, Lowietje going ahead to show the way. They crept through the trees where it twilighted and where the sun played so prettily with little golden arrows in the leafage; from there they came into the high pine-wood. Look, look! There were other boys ... and they knew where birds lived!
“Listen, Trientje,” said Lowietje. “You stay here with Poentje: I’ll come back at once and bring your pinafore full of birds’ eggs ... and young ones.”
He fetched out his climbing-cord and, in a flash, all the boys were gone, behind the trees. Trientje heard them shout and yell and, a little later, she saw her little brother sitting high up on the slippery trunk of a beech. She put her hands to her mouth and screamed:
“Lo—wie!...”
It echoed three or four times over the low shoots and against the tall trees, but Lowietje did not hear.
A man now came striding down the path; he carried a gun on his shoulder. The boys had only just seen him and, on every side, they came scrambling out of the tree-tops, slid down the trunks and darted into the underwood. Breathless, bewildered and scared to death, Lowietje came to his sister and, with his two hands, held the rents of his trousers together:
“There were eight eggs there, Trientje, but the keeper came and, in the sliding, my trousers....”
And he let a strip fall. They were torn from end to end, from top to bottom, in each leg.
“Mother will be angry,” said Trientje, very earnestly.
She took some pins from her frock and fastened the tears, so that the skin did not show.