“Ouch!” squealed Squinty.  “That hurt!  Those are funny potatoes!  I never knew they could be so hard.”

Later on he learned that what he supposed were potatoes were only stones.  You see it takes a little pig some time to learn all the things he needs to know.

Squinty let the stone roll out of his mouth, and he looked at it with such an odd look on his face, peering at it with his squinty eye, and with one ear cocked up sort of sideways, that, if you had seen him, you could not have helped laughing.  No one could, if they had seen Squinty then, but there was no one in the field to watch him.

“Well,” thought Squinty, after a bit, “this will never do.  I can’t stay here.  I must try to find my way back home.  Let me see; what had I better do?  I guess the first thing is to find that field of real potatoes, and not the make-believe ones like this,” and he pushed the stone away with his nose.

“When I find the potato field,” he went on, still talking to himself, “I am sure I can find the brook where I had a swim.  And when I find the brook I will know my way home, for there is a straight path from there to our pen.”

So Squinty started off once more to walk through the rows of corn.  As he walked along on his little short legs he grunted, and rooted in the earth with his nose.  Sometimes he stumbled over a big stone, or a clod of dirt, and fell down.

“Oh dear!” exclaimed poor Squinty, when he got up after falling down about six times, “Oh dear!  This is no fun.  I wish I had stayed in the pen with my brothers and sisters.  I wonder what they are doing now?”

Just then Squinty felt more hungry than ever, and he thought it must be feeding-time back in the pen.

“Oh, they must be having some nice sour milk just now!” thought Squinty.  “How I wish I were back with them!”

And then, as he fancied he could smell the nice sour milk, which the farmer or his wife was pouring into the eating trough of the pen, Squinty just howled and squealed with hunger.  Oh, what a noise he made!

Then this gave him an idea.

“Ha!” he exclaimed to himself, in a way pigs have, “why didn’t I think of that before?  I must squeal for help.  My mamma, or papa, may hear me and come for me.”

Then Squinty happened to think that the hole, by which he had gotten out of the pen, was not large enough for his fat papa or mamma to crawl through.

“No, they can’t get out to come for me,” Squinty thought.  “They’ll have to send Wuff-Wuff, or Squealer.  And maybe they’ll get lost, the same as I did.  Oh dear, I guess I won’t squeal any more.  It’s bad enough for me to be lost, without any of my brothers or sisters getting lost, too.”

So Squinty stopped squealing, and walked on and on between the rows of corn, trying to find his way home to the pen all by himself.  Squinty was really quite a brave pig, wasn’t he?

By this time, as you can well believe, Mr. and Mrs. Pig, in the pen, had awakened from their afternoon sleep.  And all the little pigs had awakened too, for they were beginning to feel hungry again.