In the little town of Granville in Normandy lives a worthy, simple-minded young carpenter, Michel by name. In the same town lives an old female dwarf, shrivelled and ugly, who, because she gathers up the scraps of the school-children's breakfasts, is called "la fée aux miettes." Four or five centuries ago she might have been seen in Granville, living in the same way, and she has made her appearance at intervals since. This being is assisted by the young carpenter with small sums of money, and she in return assists him with all manner of wise advice. She always speaks to him as if she were passionately in love with him, and she begs him to promise to marry her, so that by this means his money may in time return to him again. She gives him her portrait, a picture which does not resemble her at all, but represents the fairy Belkis, who in olden days was the Queen of Sheba beloved by Solomon. The youth falls in love with this picture of a beautiful, dazzling, bewitching woman. Wherever he goes her name meets him; when he determines to try his fortune in a foreign country, the ship he sails in is called the _Queen of Sheba_. He wanders about the world dreaming of Belkis, as we wander, one and all of us, dreaming of our castle in the air, our ideal, our fixed idea, which to our neighbours is madness. Falsely accused of a murder committed in the room in which he had slept at an inn, poor Michel is sentenced to be hanged. He is carried through a hooting crowd to the gallows. There proclamation is made that, according to old custom, his life will be spared if any young woman will have pity on him and take him for her husband. And behold, Folly Girlfree, a merry, pretty girl who has always liked him, approaches the scaffold, prepared to save him. But he asks time for reflection. He likes Folly Girlfree, and she is both good and beautiful, but he does not love her; he has only one love, his ardently, secretly adored ideal, the Fairy Belkis. He looks tenderly and gratefully at Folly, deliberates, and--requests to be hanged. This deliberation with the rope round his neck, this conclusion that, as Shakespeare puts it, "many a good hanging prevents a bad marriage," is described with delightful humour, with a naïve philosophy which is unforgettable from the fact that some such idea has occurred at one time or other to all of us. They are proceeding to hang Michel, when loud cries are heard, and the Crumb Fairy, followed by all the street boys, arrives breathless, bringing proofs of the prisoner's innocence. He marries her out of gratitude, but hardly has the door on the wedding night been hermetically closed between him and his aged wife, hardly has he shut his eyes than Belkis in her bridal veil approaches his couch. "Alas! Belkis, I am married, married to the Crumb Fairy." "I am she." "Nay, that is impossible; you are almost as tall as I." "That is because I have stretched myself."