# Hop-o’-My-Thumb

_Charles Perrault_ · 21 min read · ages 8-12

Abandoned in the forest, seven brothers shelter in the house of an ogre who eats children, and the smallest saves them by moving the gold crowns to his brothers’ heads. The ogre kills his daughters by mistake, and while he sleeps the boy pulls the seven-league boots off him and comes home loaded with riches.

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Once upon a time there was a woodcutter and his wife who had seven children, and every one of them was a boy.

They were very poor, and their seven children were a great burden to them, because not one of the boys was old enough yet to earn his own bread. What troubled them still more was that the youngest was a frail little thing who never said a word, and they took for stupidity what was really the mark of a fine mind. He was very small indeed. When he came into the world he was hardly bigger than a thumb, and so they called him Hop-o’-My-Thumb.

That poor child was the one the whole house took it out on, and whatever went wrong, the blame was always laid on him. Yet he was the sharpest and the shrewdest of all the brothers, and if he said little, he listened a great deal.

Then a very bad year came, and the famine was so great that these poor people made up their minds to be rid of their children. One evening, when the boys were in bed and the woodcutter was sitting by the fire with his wife, he said to her, with his heart tight with grief:

“You can see for yourself that we cannot feed our children any longer. I could not bear to watch them starve in front of my eyes, and I have decided to take them into the wood tomorrow and lose them there. It will be easy enough. While they are busy tying up the sticks, we have only to slip away without their seeing us.”

“Oh!” cried his wife. “Could you really do it yourself? Take your own children out and lose them?”

Her husband set their terrible poverty before her again and again, but she could not agree to it. She was poor, but she was their mother. In the end, though, when she had thought what it would cost her to watch them die of hunger, she gave her consent, and went to bed crying.

Hop-o’-My-Thumb heard every word they said. From his bed he had gathered that they were talking about something serious, and he had got up quietly and slipped under his father’s stool to listen without being seen. Then he went back to bed and did not sleep for the rest of the night, turning over in his mind what he had to do. He was up very early, went down to the edge of a brook, filled his pockets with little white pebbles, and came home again. They all set out, and Hop-o’-My-Thumb told his brothers nothing at all of what he knew.

They went into a forest so thick that ten paces apart they could not see one another. The woodcutter set to work cutting wood, and the children to gathering twigs and tying up the sticks. When the father and mother saw them busy at work, they drew away from them little by little, and then all at once they ran off down a narrow side path.

When the children found themselves alone, they began to shout and cry with all their might. Hop-o’-My-Thumb let them cry. He knew perfectly well how he would get them home again, because as he walked he had dropped the little white pebbles from his pockets all along the way. So he said to them:

“Don’t be frightened, brothers. Father and mother have left us here, but I will take you home again. Only follow me.”

They followed him, and he led them to their own house by the very road they had taken into the forest. At first they did not dare go in, but they all pressed up against the door to hear what their father and mother were saying.

Now, just as the woodcutter and his wife had got home, the lord of the village sent them ten crowns that he had owed them a long time and that they had given up all hope of ever seeing. It brought them back to life, for the poor souls were dying of hunger. The woodcutter sent his wife off to the butcher that very hour. As it was a long while since she had eaten, she bought three times as much meat as two people needed for supper.

When they had eaten their fill, the woodcutter’s wife said, “Oh dear, where are our poor children now? They would make a fine meal of what is left there. But it was you, William, you were the one who wanted to lose them. I said we would be sorry for it. What are they doing now in that forest? Oh, dear God, perhaps the wolves have eaten them already! You are a hard, unnatural man to have lost your own children so.”

The woodcutter lost his patience at last, for she said more than twenty times over that they would be sorry, and that she had said so all along. He threatened to beat her if she did not hold her tongue. It was not that the woodcutter was not perhaps even sorrier than his wife, but she was making his head ache, and he was of the same humour as a great many other people, who are very fond of a woman who speaks the truth, but find her most tiresome when she has been right all along.

The woodcutter’s wife was all in tears. “Oh, where are my children now, my poor children?”

She said it once so loudly that the children at the door heard her, and they all began to shout together, “Here we are! Here we are!”

She ran to open the door for them, and kissed them, saying, “How glad I am to see you again, my dear children! You are worn out and you are starving. And you, Peter, look at the state of you, mud from head to foot. Come here and let me wash your face.”

This Peter was her eldest son, and she loved him more than all the rest, because his hair was a little red, and hers was a little red as well.

They sat down at the table and ate with an appetite that did the father and mother good to see, and they told them how frightened they had been in the forest, nearly all of them talking at once. These good people were overjoyed to have their children with them again, and the joy lasted exactly as long as the ten crowns lasted.

But when the money was spent, they fell back into their old misery, and made up their minds to lose the children again. And this time, so as not to fail, they would take them much farther than before.

They could not talk about it so secretly that Hop-o’-My-Thumb did not hear them, and he reckoned he would get out of the trouble as he had got out of it before. But although he was up at first light to go and gather his little pebbles, he could not manage it, for he found the house door locked and double-locked. He did not know what to do, until their mother gave each of them a piece of bread for breakfast, and he thought he might use his bread instead of pebbles by scattering it in crumbs along the roads they took. So he tucked it away in his pocket.

The father and mother led them into the thickest and darkest part of the forest, and as soon as they were there, the parents took a side path and left them. Hop-o’-My-Thumb was not much troubled about it, because he believed he would easily find the way back by means of the bread he had sown wherever he had gone. But he was greatly astonished when he could not find a single crumb of it. The birds had come and eaten it all.

Then they were in real distress, for the more they walked the more they lost their way, and the deeper they went into the forest. Night came on, and a great wind rose that filled them with dreadful fear. On every side they thought they could hear nothing but the howling of wolves coming to eat them. They hardly dared speak to one another or turn their heads. Then heavy rain came down and soaked them to the bone. They slipped at every step and fell in the mud, and got up again plastered with it, their hands so filthy they did not know where to put them.

Hop-o’-My-Thumb climbed to the top of a tree to see whether he could make out anything. Turning his head every way, he saw a little glimmer like a candle, but far off, beyond the forest. He came down from the tree, and once he was on the ground he could see nothing at all, which cast him down badly. Still, when he and his brothers had walked for some time toward the side where he had seen the light, he saw it again as they came out of the wood.

At last they reached the house where the candle was, though not without a great many frights along the way, because they often lost sight of it, and that happened every time they went down into a hollow. They knocked at the door, and a kind woman came to open it. She asked them what they wanted. Hop-o’-My-Thumb told her that they were poor children who had lost their way in the forest, and who begged for a bed for charity’s sake. The woman, seeing what pretty children they all were, began to cry, and said to them:

“Alas, my poor children, where have you come to? Do you know that this is the house of an ogre who eats little children?”

“Oh, madam,” answered Hop-o’-My-Thumb, trembling from head to foot, as his brothers were, “what shall we do? If you will not take us in, the wolves of the forest will certainly eat us tonight, and that being so, we would rather the gentleman ate us. Perhaps he will take pity on us, if you will be good enough to ask him.”

The ogre’s wife thought she might be able to hide them from her husband until the next morning, so she let them in and took them to warm themselves at a good fire, where a whole sheep was turning on the spit for the ogre’s supper.

Just as they were beginning to get warm, they heard three or four great knocks at the door. It was the ogre coming home. His wife hid them under the bed at once and went to open it. The first thing the ogre asked was whether supper was ready and whether the wine had been drawn, and then he sat straight down at the table. The mutton was still all bloody, but that only made it better to his taste. He sniffed to the right and to the left, saying that he smelled fresh meat.

“It must be the calf I have just dressed that you can smell,” said his wife.

“I smell fresh meat, I tell you again,” said the ogre, looking at his wife out of the corner of his eye, “and there is something here that I do not understand.”

With these words he got up from the table and went straight to the bed.

“So this is how you would cheat me, you wretched woman!” he said. “I hardly know what keeps me from eating you as well. It is lucky for you that you are a tough old thing. Here is game that comes just in time for me to entertain three ogre friends of mine who are to visit me one of these days.”

He pulled the boys out from under the bed one after another. The poor children went down on their knees and begged him for mercy, but they had to do with the cruellest ogre of them all, who was so far from pitying them that he was already eating them with his eyes, and telling his wife what dainty morsels they would make once she had prepared a good sauce for them.

He went and fetched a great knife, and as he came toward the poor children he sharpened it on a long stone that he held in his left hand. He had already got hold of one of them when his wife said to him:

“What do you want to do at this hour? Won’t you have time enough tomorrow?”

“Hold your tongue,” said the ogre. “They will be all the tenderer for it.”

“But you still have so much meat there,” his wife went on. “Look, there is a calf, two sheep and half a pig!”

“You are right,” said the ogre. “Give them a good supper so that they do not grow thin, and then take them up to bed.”

The kind woman was overjoyed, and brought them a fine supper. But they could not eat a mouthful, they were so gripped with fear. As for the ogre, he went back to his drinking, delighted to have something so good to treat his friends with. He drank a dozen glasses more than usual, which went a little to his head and obliged him to go to bed.

The ogre had seven daughters, who were still only children. These little ogresses all had beautiful complexions, because they ate fresh meat like their father. But they had little round grey eyes, hooked noses, and very large mouths with long, sharp teeth set wide apart. They were not very wicked yet, but they promised a great deal, for they already bit little children to suck their blood. They had been put to bed early, and all seven of them lay in one big bed, each with a gold crown on her head.

In the same room there was another bed of the same size, and it was in this bed that the ogre’s wife put the seven little boys to sleep. After that she went to her own bed.

Hop-o’-My-Thumb had noticed that the ogre’s daughters had gold crowns on their heads, and he was afraid the ogre might be sorry he had not cut the boys’ throats that very evening. So about the middle of the night he got up, and taking his brothers’ caps and his own, he went very softly and put them on the heads of the ogre’s seven daughters, after lifting off their gold crowns, which he set on his brothers’ heads and on his own. In that way the ogre would take them for his daughters, and his daughters for the boys whose throats he meant to cut.

It turned out exactly as he had thought. The ogre woke about midnight and was sorry he had put off until tomorrow what he could have done that very evening. So he threw himself out of bed and took up his great knife.

“Let us go and see how our young rascals are getting on,” he said. “We shall not have to do this twice.”

He groped his way up to his daughters’ room and went over to the bed where the little boys were. They were all asleep except Hop-o’-My-Thumb, who was terribly frightened when he felt the ogre’s hand feeling his head, as it had felt the heads of all his brothers. The ogre felt the gold crowns.

“Well now,” he said, “I was about to make a fine piece of work of it. I can see I drank too much last night.”

Then he went to his daughters’ bed, and having felt the boys’ little caps, he said, “Ah, here they are, our fine fellows. Let us go to work boldly.”

With those words he cut the throats of his seven daughters, one after another, without a moment’s hesitation. Well pleased with the business, he went back to his own room and to bed.

As soon as Hop-o’-My-Thumb heard the ogre snoring, he woke his brothers and told them to dress quickly and follow him. They went quietly down into the garden and jumped over the wall. They ran almost the whole night, trembling all the way and never knowing where they were going.

When the ogre woke, he said to his wife, “Go upstairs and dress those young rascals of last night.”

The ogress was quite astonished at her husband’s kindness, never suspecting what he meant by dressing them, and believing that he was telling her to go and put their clothes on. She went upstairs, where she had a terrible surprise: she saw her seven daughters with their throats cut, lying in their blood.

She began by fainting, which is the first remedy that nearly every woman finds in a case like that. The ogre, afraid that his wife was taking too long over the errand he had given her, went up to help her. He was no less astonished than she had been when he saw that dreadful sight.

“Ah, what have I done!” he cried. “They shall pay me for it, the wretches, and this very hour.”

He threw a jug of water in his wife’s face at once, and when he had brought her round he said, “Give me my seven-league boots, quickly, so that I can go and catch them.”

He took to the road, and after running far and wide on every side, he came at last onto the very road along which the poor children were walking, and by then they were no more than a hundred paces from their father’s house. They saw the ogre going from mountain to mountain and crossing rivers as easily as if they had been the smallest of streams. Hop-o’-My-Thumb saw a hollow rock close to the place where they were, and he hid his six brothers in it and squeezed in himself, keeping watch all the while to see what would become of the ogre.

The ogre was very tired from the long road he had run for nothing, since seven-league boots wear a man out badly, and he wanted to rest. As chance would have it, he went and sat down on the very rock where the little boys were hidden.

He was worn out with weariness, so after resting a while he fell asleep, and he began to snore so frightfully that the poor children were no less afraid than when he had been holding his great knife to cut their throats. Hop-o’-My-Thumb was less frightened than the rest, and he told his brothers to run home quickly while the ogre was sleeping so soundly, and not to trouble themselves about him. They took his advice and soon reached the house.

Hop-o’-My-Thumb went up to the ogre, pulled off his boots very gently and put them on at once. The boots were very big and very wide, but as they were enchanted, they had the gift of growing larger or smaller to fit the leg of whoever wore them, so that they fitted his feet and his legs as exactly as if they had been made for him.

He went straight to the ogre’s house, where he found the ogre’s wife crying beside her murdered daughters.

“Your husband is in great danger,” Hop-o’-My-Thumb said to her. “He has been taken by a band of robbers who have sworn to kill him if he does not give them all his gold and all his silver. At the very moment when they were holding a dagger to his throat, he caught sight of me and begged me to come and tell you what a state he is in, and to say that you must give me everything of value that he owns, without keeping back a thing, for otherwise they will kill him without mercy. As the matter is so pressing, he wanted me to take his seven-league boots, which you see here, both so that I could make haste and so that you would not think I was an impostor.”

The good woman was terrified, and gave him at once everything she had, for this ogre was a very good husband for all that he ate little children. So Hop-o’-My-Thumb, loaded with all the ogre’s riches, went back to his father’s house, where they were overjoyed to see him.

There are a great many people who do not agree about this last part of the story, and who insist that Hop-o’-My-Thumb never robbed the ogre at all. They allow that he certainly had no scruple about taking the seven-league boots, since the ogre used them for nothing but running after little children. These people declare they know it on good authority, and even from having eaten and drunk in the woodcutter’s house. What they say is that when Hop-o’-My-Thumb had put on the ogre’s boots, he went off to the court, where he knew that everybody was in great anxiety about an army two hundred leagues away and about the outcome of a battle that had just been fought. He went, so they say, to find the king, and told him that if he wished it, he would bring him news of the army before the day was out. The king promised him a large sum of money if he could do it. Hop-o’-My-Thumb brought the news that very evening, and as this first errand had made his name known, he could earn whatever he pleased, for the king paid him extremely well for carrying his orders to the army. After following the trade of courier for some time and gathering a great deal of wealth by it, he went home to his father, where the joy at seeing him again was more than anyone could imagine. He set his whole family at their ease. He bought newly created offices for his father and for his brothers, and in that way he established them all, and at the same time secured his own place at court.

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- Read online: https://talerie.com/en/tales/hop-o-my-thumb-original
- Source: Le Petit Poucet (Charles Perrault, 1697 ; éd. 1902 des Contes de Perrault) (https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Contes_de_Perrault_(éd._1902)/Le_Petit_Poucet)
- Public-domain basis: Talerie contemporary retelling (CC0 2026), based on: Le Petit Poucet (Charles Perrault, 1697 ; éd. 1902 des Contes de Perrault) — original: author died 1703 (+70 passed)
- License: CC0-1.0 (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)