The Woodcutter called the Star-Child, and said to him,
"Here is thy mother, waiting for thee."
But the Star-Child laughed scornfully.
"I am no son of thine," he said. "I am a Star-Child, and thou art a beggar, and ugly, and in rags. Get thee hence that I may see thee no more."
"Oh, my little son," cried the beggar-woman. "Will you not kiss me before I go? I have suffered much to find thee."
"No," said the Star-Child. "I would rather kiss an adder or a toad than thee."
So the woman went away into the forest, weeping bitterly, and the Star-Child was glad and ran back to his playmates. But when they saw him coming they ran away from him in fear. He went to the well and looked in. Lo, his face was as the face of a toad and his body was scaled like an adder. He flung himself down on the grass, and wept.
"I denied my mother," he said. "This has come upon me because of my sin. I will seek her through all the world, nor rest until I have found her."
So he ran away into the forest and called out to his mother to come to him, but there was no answer. All day long he called to her, and when the sun set he lay down to sleep on a bed of leaves, and the birds and the animals fled from him, for they remembered his cruelty, and he was alone save for the toad that watched him, and the slow adder that crawled past.
And in the morning he rose up and plucked some bitter berries from the trees and ate them, and took his way through the great wood, weeping sorely. And of everything that he met he made inquiry if perchance they had seen his mother.