In the turf-house loft, as well as in the burial-mound, and down in the willow bole—where she has also paid a visit—all is cold and lonely and full of damp and discomfort.
She longs for the spacious, broken-down farm loft, where the moss-covered thatch clings to the broad, low chimney-stacks; where the clay-lined walls are warping and the small-paned windows hang askew.
There is her real home, the home of her race....
The new farm-buildings, where bricks replace clay and wood, don’t attract her; they are much too cold, and too clean! No; where there are hatchways instead of doors, hooks instead of locks, pegs and staples instead of keys, that is where she feels at home. She can always be relied upon to find her way in through some split in the roof, some air-hole in the wall....
And the “cunning ones”? Oh, perhaps it would not be so bad to live among them again, after all!
Yet another week she hesitates on the threshold—then one afternoon her longing for the room, with all its sweet memories of kittenhood, overwhelms her....
A storm raged over the fields! It swept hissing along the shaggy ditches and writhed screaming and whistling through hedge and fence.
At one moment whitish-grey, swollen masses of cloud came pouring like a flood of liquid lead across the sky, to fling down a shower of seething rain ... at another the clouds split and parted, and the sun created heaven out of chaos: a strip of blue appeared, a stream of dazzling light—and the earth broke into a smile of joy!
For one short minute the farm’s white gables and moss-green roofs with their frame of yellow poplar-tops sprang into life and colour....
Then the picture broke, shattered into a thousand fragments; the white gable, the whole farm, sank into the ground—and once more the rain fell in torrents.