Rumpelstiltskin

Once upon a time, in a village on the road to the king's city, there lived a miller who talked too much. Meeting the king one day, and wanting to sound important, he said that his daughter could spin straw into gold. The king was very interested indeed. So the miller's daughter was taken to the palace and shut in a room with a spinning wheel, a stool and straw piled to the rafters, and told it had better be gold by morning. She sat down on the stool and cried, because she could no more spin straw into gold than she could spin it into soup. Then the door opened, and in came a little man in a green coat. "Why the tears?" She told him. "I could do that," he said. "What will you give me?" She gave him her necklace. He sat down at the wheel, and it went whirr, whirr, whirr, and by morning every scrap of straw was gold thread wound on spools. The king was delighted. He put her in a bigger room with more straw. The second night she gave the little man her ring, and by morning the second room was gold as well. The third night the king said that if she filled the largest room in the palace he would marry her. But she had nothing left to give. "Then promise me your first child," said the little man. She was tired and frightened, and a first child seemed a long way off, and she promised. She married the king. A year later she had a son, and had honestly forgotten the whole business until the little man walked into her room. "I have come for him," he said. She offered him everything in the kingdom. He was not interested. He looked at her for a moment, and something in his face shifted, because he was not entirely made of business. "Three days," he said. "Guess my name, and you keep him." She sent messengers out over the country. On the first day she tried every name she had ever heard. On the second, every strange name the messengers brought back. He shook his head at all of them and looked rather pleased. On the third day the last messenger came in late. He had been in a wood on a mountain, he said, where a little man was hopping round a fire on one leg and singing that nobody knew his name was Rumpelstiltskin. That evening the little man came for the last time. "Is it Conrad?" "No." "Is it Harry?" "No." "Then is it," said the queen, "Rumpelstiltskin?" He stood absolutely still. "Who told you," he said. "Who told you that." Then he stamped once, very hard, and went out of the window and over the rooftops, and nobody in that kingdom saw him again. The queen kept her son. And she never once repeated a boast that was not hers to make. The end.