We lodged in a dark and very small room. But from my bed I could see a little bit of sky in the morning, and the chimney of our neighbour’s house. But when the smoke rose from the chimney, and was coloured red and yellow by the rising sun, under the dome of the blue sky, then I thought the world up there in the air must be very beautiful, and I longed to go thither.
I conceived a great desire to fly, and confided this wish to Joanna. We made ourselves paper wings, and as these could not lift us up, we tried whether they would not at least sustain us, if we let ourselves go, without holding on to anything, from the stove, chest of drawers, or whatever we had climbed up upon.
But besides that, we got many bruises in these attempts, we made such a noise by falling to the floor, that it brought in the old woman, who gave a hearty scolding to the clumsy angels. Meanwhile, we thought of still another means of sustaining ourselves as we hovered over the earth. We selected suitable sticks, which we used as stilts, and on these we went round about the court yard, imagining all the time that we were flying.
Would that we had been content with this! But the desire to know more of the world without, threw us into misfortune. The house which we lived in was situated within a court-yard, and was separated from the street by a high wooden fence. A part of the enclosure was a garden, well fenced in and belonged to a notary. He was a severe man, and we were much afraid of him.
The temptation to evil came this time in the shape of a little pig. We saw, one day, when we were passing our play hour in the court-yard, a fortunate pig, who was enjoying himself in the most riotous manner in this garden. Spinach, tulips, strawberries, and parsley, all were thrown around him, as he dug with his snout in the earth.
Our anger at this was very great, and not less our wonder how the pig could have got into the garden, as the gate was shut and the fence was so firm. We looked about carefully, and at last discovered a hole, which had been nearly covered by a few old boards placed against it, but which the little pig had instinctively found out, and through which he had forced his way.
We thought it of the greatest importance to get the pig immediately out of the pleasure garden, and we could see no other means of doing so than to creep through, in at the same hole by which he had made his way; and now we hunted with great zeal our poor guide, and then put in order, as well as we could, what he had scattered about.
We closed the hole in the fence with a board, but could not resist the desire to let it serve us, now and then, as an entrance to this paradise. As we did not mean to hurt, or even meddle with anything in the garden, we thought it would not be wrong to take a breath of fresh air now and then. Every Sunday, in particular, we crept in by the pig’s hole, which we always closed carefully after us. All around, within the garden fence, there was a hedge of syringa bushes, which hindered us from being seen from without.