ONCE UPON A TIME there was a poor farmer who frequently went to the woods to chop firewood. One day, however, among the branches she had gathered she found a golden coin, which she took along, never to tell anyone, as she pretended to be very poor.

Despite her poverty, she dressed two of her children with fine clothes, and the other two, which were not her real children but rather orphans she had adopted, she dressed with dirty rugs.

A man knocked on her door one day and asked to see the children. She then showed him the adopted children, and kept her own children hidden in the basement. "We are very poor", she explained, pointing at the rugs they were wearing.

The stranger then left her two golden coins for her to buy them new clothes. She took the money, then went to the basement to free her children, only, however, to see the adopted children disappear and never appear again, as the stranger had transformed them into fairies.