, he said to her, with his heart ready to burst with
grief:

"Thou seest plainly that we are not able to keep our children, and I
cannot see them starve to death before my face; I am resolved to lose
them in the wood to-morrow, which may very easily be done; for, while
they are busy in tying up fagots, we may run away, and leave them,
without their taking any notice."

"Ah!" cried his wife; "and canst thou thyself have the heart to take thy
children out along with thee on purpose to lose them?"

In vain did her husband represent to her their extreme poverty: she
would not consent to it; she was indeed poor, but she was their mother.
However, having considered what a grief it would be to her to see them
perish with hunger, she at last consented, and went to bed all in tears.

Little Thumb heard every word that had been spoken; for observing, as
he lay in his bed, that they were talking very busily, he got up softly,
and hid himself under his father's stool, that he might hear what they
said without being seen. He went to bed again, but did not sleep a wink
all the rest of the night, thinking on what he had to do. He got up
early in the morning, and went to the river-side, where he filled his
pockets full of small white pebbles, and then returned home.

They all went abroad, but Little Thumb never told his brothers one
syllable of what he knew. They went into a very thick forest, where they
could not another at ten paces distance. The fagot-maker began to cut
wood, and the children to gather up the sticks to make fagots. Their
father and mother, seeing them busy at their work, got away from them
insensibly, and ran away from them all at once, along a by-way through
the winding bushes.

When the children saw they were left alone, they began to cry as loud as
they could. Little Thumb let them cry on, knowing very well how to get
home again, for, as he came, he took care to drop all along the way the
little white pebbles he had in his pockets. Then he said to them:

"Be not afraid, brothers; father and mother have left us here, but I
will lead you home again, only follow me."

They did so, and he brought them home by the very same way they came
into the forest. They dared not go in, but sat themselves down at the
door, listening to what their father and mother were saying.

The very moment the fagot-maker and his wife reached home the lord of
the manor sent them ten crowns, which he had owed them a long while, and