But the boy was healthy and happy, and the mother never had any
trouble with him. But the trouble came. One day she'd been working in
the field, and she came home, and as soon as she was in the house she
heard crying from the bed where the child used to sleep. She ran to
look at him, and he lay there, looking sick and thin and weak, the way
your boy does, and crying that he was hungry. He was like her child
and he was not like him. He'd grown so pale and bad-looking that she
thought he'd had a stroke from the Good People. But she went to get
him some bread and milk, and she asked her other boy, that was about
seven years old, when it was and how it was that he began to be sick.
"'I left him playing near the fire,' the boy said, 'and I was in the
other room. And I heard a rushing noise, like a great flock of birds
flying down the chimney, and then I heard a cry from my brother and
then again the noise, like the birds were flying out at the chimney
again. And then I ran in and found him there the way you see him
now.'
"Well, if the poor woman had never had trouble with the child before,
she had nothing but trouble now.
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