"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 Haensel 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 Haensel, 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," Haensel 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 Haensel 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. They had no sooner gone out than the poor, distracted woman, exhausted with the day's tramping and unsuccessful effort to sell her brooms, sat at the table weeping over the lost milk; and finally she fell asleep. After a while a merry song was heard in the wood, and the father presently appeared singing, at the very threshold. Really, for a hungry man with a hungry family and nothing for supper, he was in a remarkably merry mood. "Ho, there, wife!" he called, and then entered with a great basket over his shoulder. He saw the mother asleep and stopped singing. Then he laughed and went over to her. "Hey, wake up, old lady, hustle yourself and get us a supper. Where are the children?" "What are you talking about," the mother asked, waking up and looking confused at the noise her husband was making. "I can't get any supper when there is nothing to get."