There came a year of bad harvest, and the famine was so severe that these poor people determined to get rid of their children. One evening, when they were all in bed, and the woodcutter was sitting over the fire with his wife, he said to her, with an aching heart, "You see plainly that we can no longer find food for our children. I cannot let them die of hunger before my very eyes, and I have made up my mind to take them to the wood to-morrow, and there lose them, which will be easily done, for whilst they are busy tying up the faggots, we have only to run away unseen by them." "Ah!" exclaimed the woodcutter's wife, "Can you find the heart to lose your own children?" In vain her husband represented to her their great poverty; she would not consent to the deed. She was poor, but she was their mother. After a while, however, having thought over the misery it would be to her to see them die of hunger, she assented to her husband's proposal, and went weeping to bed. Little Thumbling had overheard all they said, for having found out, as he lay in his bed, that they were talking of their affairs, he got up quietly and crept under his father's stool, so as to listen to what they were saying without been seen. He went to bed again, but did not sleep a wink the rest of the night, thinking what he should do. He got up early, and went down to the banks of the stream; there he filled his pockets with small white pebbles, and then returned home. They set out all together, and Little Thumbling said not a word to his brothers of what he had overheard. They entered a very thick forest, wherein, at ten paces distant, they could not see one another. The woodcutter began to cut wood, and the children to pick up brushwood for the faggots. The father and mother, seeing them busy at work, gradually stole farther and farther away from them, and then suddenly ran off down a little winding path. [Illustration: '_The boys followed him._']