After some time, however, the gray-haired man came, took his candle, looked at the girl and shook his head. When he saw that she had fallen into a sound sleep, he opened a trap-door, and let her down into the cellar.
Late at night, the woodcutter came home, and reproached his wife for leaving him to hunger all day. “It is not my fault,” she replied, “the girl went out with your dinner, and must have lost herself, but she is sure to come back to-morrow.”
The woodcutter, however, arose before dawn to go into the wood, and requested that the second daughter should take him his dinner that day. “I will take a bag with lentils,” said he; “the seeds are larger than millet. The girl will see them better, and can’t lose her way.”
At dinner-time, therefore, the girl took out the food, but the lentils had disappeared. The birds of the wood had picked them up as they had done the day before, and had left none.
The girl wandered about in the wood until night, and then she too reached the house of the Old Man, was told to go in, and begged for food and a bed. The man with the white beard again asked the animals:
“Pretty little Hen,
Pretty little Cock,
And pretty brindled Cow,
What say ye all now?”
The animals again replied “Duks.” And everything happened just as it had happened the day before. The girl cooked a good meal, ate and drank with the Old Man, and did not concern herself about the animals, and when she inquired about her bed, they answered:
“Thou hast eaten with him,
Thou hast drunk with him,
Thou hast had, no thought for us,
So find out for thyself where thou canst pass the night.”
When she was asleep the Old Man came, looked at her, shook his head, and let her down into the cellar.
On the third morning, the woodcutter said to his wife, “Send our youngest child out with my dinner to-day, she has always been good and obedient, and will stay in the right path, and not run about after every wild bumblebee, as her sisters did.”