she sang, holding out her hands.
"I don't know how, or I would," Hänsel declared, watching her as she spun about.
"Then I'll teach you. Just keep your eyes on me and I'll teach you just how to do it," she cried, and then she began to dance. Gretel told him precisely how to do it, and Hänsel learned very well and very quickly. Then they danced together, and in half a minute had forgotten all about going back to their work. They twirled and laughed and sang and shouted in the wildest sort of glee, and at last, perfectly exhausted with so much fun, they tumbled over one another upon the floor, and were laughing too hard to get up. Just at this moment, when they had actually forgotten all about hunger and work, home came their mother. She opened the door and looked in.
"For mercy's sake! what goings on are these?" she cried.
"Why, it was Hänsel, he——"
"Gretel wanted to——" they both began, scrambling to their feet.
"That will do. I want to hear nothing from you. You are the most ill-behaved children in the world. Here are your father and I slaving ourselves to death for you, and not a thing do you do but dance and sing from morning till night——"
"It would be awfully nice to eat, too," Hänsel replied reflectively.
"What's that you say, you ungrateful child? Don't you eat whenever the rest of us do?" However harsh she seemed, the mother was only angry at the thought of there being nothing in the house to eat, and she felt so badly to think the children were hungry that she made a dive at Hänsel to slap him, when—horrors! she knocked the milk off the table, broke the jug, and all the milk went streaming over the floor. This was indeed a misfortune. There they stood, all three looking at their lost supper.
"Now see what you have done?" she screamed angrily at the children. "Get yourselves out of here. If you want any supper you'll have to work for it. Take that basket and go into the wood and fill it with strawberries, and don't either of you come home till it is full. Dear me, it does seem as if I had trouble enough without such actions as yours," the distracted mother cried; and quite unjustly she hustled the children and their basket outside the hut and off into the wood.