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Updated: June 23, 2025
"Oh, weh! oh, weh!" The Child-Who-Was-Tired pushed and pulled them apart, muffled them into their coats, and drove them out of the house. "Hurry, hurry! the second bell's rung," she urged, knowing perfectly well she was telling a story, and rather exulting in the fact. She washed up the breakfast things, then went down to the cellar to look out the potatoes and beetroot.
She was just beginning to walk along a little white road with tall black trees on either side, a little road that led to nowhere, and where nobody walked at all, when a hand gripped her shoulder, shook her, slapped her ear. "Oh, oh, don't stop me," cried the Child-Who-Was-Tired. "Let me go."
"Perhaps," thought the Child-Who-Was-Tired, "if I walked far enough up this road I might come to a little white one, with tall black trees on either side a little road " "Salad, salad!" cried the Frau's voice from the house.
"Get up, you good-for-nothing brat," said a voice; "get up and light the oven or I'll shake every bone out of your body." With an immense effort she opened her eyes, and saw the Frau standing by, the baby bundled under one arm. The three other children who shared the same bed with the Child-Who-Was-Tired, accustomed to brawls, slept on peacefully.
As the day drew in the Child-Who-Was-Tired did not know how to fight her sleepiness any longer. She was afraid to sit down or stand still. As she sat at supper the Man and the Frau seemed to swell to an immense size as she watched them, and then become smaller than dolls, with little voices that seemed to come from outside the window.
She laid the baby on the wooden settle, covering him with a shawl, then poured the coffee from the earthenware jug into the saucepan, and set it on the spirit lamp to boil. "I'm sleepy," nodded the Child-Who-Was-Tired, kneeling on the floor and splitting the damp pine logs into little chips. "That's why I'm not awake." The oven took a long time to light.
She laughed for the first time that day, and clapped her hands. "Ts ts ts!" she said, "lie there, silly one; you WILL go to sleep. You'll not cry any more or wake up in the night. Funny, little, ugly baby." He opened his eyes, and shrieked loudly at the sight of the Child-Who-Was-Tired. From the next room she heard the Frau call out to her. "One moment he is almost asleep," she cried.
One by one she laid the children across her knee and severely beat them, expending a final burst of energy on the Child-Who-Was-Tired, then returned to bed, with a comfortable sense of her maternal duties in good working order for the day.
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