“How far is it to Snoring?” she asked of Buttercup in the bag.
“A good two miles,” answered Buttercup.
“Two miles! That is a long way. I’ll just lie down and sleep a bit, and do you keep as still as a mouse in the bag, or it will be the worse for you.”
She tied the mouth of the bag up tight, and then she fell fast asleep, and snored till the leaves shook overhead.
When he heard that, Buttercup took from his pocket a little dull old knife that his father had given him, and managed to cut a slit in the sack and crawl out. Then he found a gnarly stump of a fir tree and put that in the bag in his place and ran away home to his mother, and all this while the old witch never stirred.
After a time, however, she began to stretch her bones and look about her. “Eh! Eh!” she sighed, “that was a good sleep I had, but now we’ll be journeying on again.”
She slung the bag on her back, but the sharp points of the root kept sticking into her at every step. “That boy looked plump and soft enough,” she muttered to herself, “but now he seems all elbows and knees.” Then she cried to the stump, “Hey! there, you inside the bag, do not stick your bones into me like that. Do you think I am a pin cushion?”
The stump made no answer for it could not, and besides it had not heard, and the old witch hobbled on muttering and grumbling to herself.
When she reached her house her ugly, stupid witch daughter was watching for her from the window. “Have you brought home anything to eat?” she called.
“Yes, I have brought home a fine plump boy,” said the witch, and she threw the bag down on the floor and began rubbing her bruises. “I’m half dead with carrying him, too.”