The Three Wishes

Once upon a time, and it was long ago, there lived a poor woodman with his wife in a little cottage at the edge of a great forest. Every morning, as soon as the sun shone over the treetops, he shouldered his axe and went out to fell timber. The goodwife filled his wallet with bread and cheese, hung a bottle of small ale at his belt, and waved him off from the door. They were not rich, but they had a roof over their heads, a fire in the hearth, and each other, and so it had been for many, many years.

That morning the woodman went deeper into the forest than usual, until he came to a clearing where a giant old oak stood alone in the middle of the moss. The trunk was so wide that three men could not have linked their arms around it, and the branches reached up like arms to the sky. 'This oak,' he thought, patting the bark, 'will give me plank after plank, board after board. It will last the whole winter, and maybe the next as well.' He spat into his hands, raised the axe above his head, and swung back for the very first stroke.

But just as the axe came whistling down through the air, he heard a voice, soft and pleading, ringing between the trunks. 'Please, please, put down your axe.' The woodman stopped in mid-stroke. The blade trembled a hair's breadth from the bark. And there, before him, between the roots and the yellow acorns, stood a tiny creature the like of which he had never seen. She was not much taller than his knee, dressed in a green gown of leaves, with wings as thin as spider silk. 'It is a fairy,' he whispered to himself, and almost dropped his axe in the moss.

'This oak is my home,' said the fairy with great wide eyes. 'And all my sisters and brothers live in it with me. Spare the tree, please, and you shall not regret it.' The woodman opened his mouth, but no sound came out. He stared and blinked and stared again. At last he found his tongue, lowered his axe, and said, his voice a little shaky, 'Well, I shall do as thou wishest. Such an old, fine oak I would not have on my conscience.' The fairy smiled so brightly that the whole clearing seemed to light up, and she rose on tiptoe to look him straight in the eyes.