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Tale Summary

Once upon a time there was a set of twins, a boy and a girl, whose father remarried after their mother’s death and had several more children. The stepmother was cruel and decided to send them to a wicked witch in the woods, telling them it was her granny. The children stopped at their own grandmother’s house on the way and told her where they were headed and she advised them to be civil and pleasant, and sent them along with a bottle of milk, a piece of ham, and a loaf of bread. The witch took them as servants and gave the boy a sieve to carry water from the well, sat the girl down to spin yarn, and told them that she would fry them in the oven if they failed, and then she went into the woods. When the girl cried because she did not know how to spin, hundreds of mice asked her for bread in exchange for help. She gave this to them, and they said that the witch had a cat who would show her a way out of the forest in exchange for ham, and that in the meantime they would spin for her. She went out to her brother, who was also crying, when a flight of wrens asked for the same as the mice and advised the boy to fill the sieve’s holes with clay. After bringing the water back to the house, they fed the cat ham and were given a comb and a handkerchief to throw behind them when they made their escape. The next day the witch gave them more tasks, but as soon as she left they ran away as fast as they could. They met the guard dog, who let them pass when they gave him some bread, and then dangerously unkempt birch branches, which they tied up with a ribbon, and made it to the open fields. When the witch realized they were escaping, she asked the cat, the dog, and the trees why they did not stop the children, and got the answer that the children were kinder than she was. She hurried after the twins, and when they heard her approach they threw the handkerchief behind them and it became a deep river, which slowed her down. They then threw the comb, which became a dense forest, and she was forced to turn back. The two made it home and told their father all that had happened. He drove their stepmother away and lived happily with the children.

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