But Johnnie said, "Never mind, Grizzle, I can take you home; you just follow me."
So Johnnie looked out for the pebbles he had dropped, and found them at each turn of the road, and a little after midday got home and asked their mother for their dinner.
"There's nothing in the house, children, but you can go and get some water from the well and, please God, we'll have bread in the morning."
When the farmer came home he was astonished to find that the children had found their way home, and could not imagine how they had done so. But at night he said to his wife,
"Betty, my dear, I do not know how the children came home; but that does not make any difference; I cannot bear to see them starve before my eyes, better that they should starve in the forest. I will take them there again to-morrow."
Johnnie heard all this and crept downstairs and put some more pebbles into his pocket; and though the farmer took them this time further into the forest the same thing occurred as the day before. But this time Grizzle said to her mother and father,
"Johnnie did such a funny thing; whenever we turned a new road he dropped pebbles. Wasn't that funny? And when we came back he looked for the pebbles, and there they were; they had not moved."
Then the farmer knew how he had been done, and as evening came on he locked all the doors so that Johnnie could not get out to get any pebbles. In the morning he gave them a hunk of bread as before for their breakfast and told them he was going to take them into the nice forest again. Grizzle ate her bread, but Johnnie put his into his pocket, and when they got inside the forest at every turning he dropped a few crumbs of his bread. When his father left them he tried to trace his way back by means of these crumbs. But, alas, and alackaday! The little birds had seen the crumbs and eaten them all up, and when Johnnie went to search for them they had all disappeared.
So they wandered and they wandered, more and more hungry all the time, till they came to a glade in which there was a funny little house; and what do you think it was made of? The door was made of butter-scotch, the windows of sugar candy, the bricks were all chocolate creams, the pillars of lollypops, and the roof of gingerbread.
No sooner had the children seen this funny little house than they rushed up to it and commenced to pick pieces off the door, and take out some of the bricks, while Johnnie climbed on Grizzle's back, and tore off some of the roof (what was that made of?). Just as they were eating all this the door opened and a little old woman, with red eyes, came out and said,