Several years had now passed away in the service of the old woman and one day she put on her cocoa-nut shoes, took her staff and basket in her hand, and prepared to go out. Before leaving she told Jacob to cook a chicken for her dinner on her return and be sure to stuff it well with seasoning. When he had prepared the chicken, he went to the room where the herbs were kept to collect some to stuff it with, and to his surprise saw a little cupboard that he had not noticed before. The door was ajar and he peeped curiously in and saw a number of little baskets from which issued a strong and pleasant odour. He opened one of them and saw that it contained a very curious-looking plant. The leaves and stalks were of a bluish-green colour and it bore a flower of a deep red hue, flecked with yellow. He looked closely at the flower, then smelt it and noticed it had the same scent as the soup which the old woman had once cooked for him. It was a very strong scent, so strong indeed that it made him sneeze, and he went on sneezing again and again until at length--he awoke. He lay on the old woman’s sofa and looked around him in surprise. “How real dreams do seem sometimes,” he said to himself. “I could have been certain that I was a squirrel just now, and had guinea-pigs and squirrels for my companions, also that I had learnt to be a first-rate cook. How Mother will laugh when I tell her all about it, but she will scold me, too, for having fallen asleep in a stranger’s house instead of helping her in the market-place.” He jumped up in a hurry, but his limbs were stiff from sleeping so long, especially his neck; he could not turn it about very easily, and he seemed so sleepy still that he kept striking his nose against the walls and cupboards. As he stood upon the threshold the guinea-pigs and squirrels came whimpering round him as though they would like to go with him and he begged them to come, for they were dear little creatures, but they went clattering back in their nut-shell shoes and he could hear them squeaking away in the house. The old woman had brought him a long distance from the market-place, and he had some difficulty in finding his way back through the narrow lanes, especially as there seemed to be a great crowd of people. Somewhere near he thought there must be a dwarf to be seen, for the people were pushing and craning their necks and calling out to one another, “Just look, what a hideous dwarf! Where can he come from? What a long nose he has, and how his head is sunk between his high shoulders; he has no neck at all, and see what great brown hands he has.” Jacob would have liked to have seen the dwarf himself, for he always liked to see anything extraordinary, but he could not wait, because he knew he ought to hurry back to his mother.