The Elves and the Shoemaker

The story

Once, in a small town, there lived a shoemaker. He was skilled and honest, but hard times had worn away nearly everything he owned, until only one piece of leather was left — just enough for a single pair of shoes. One evening he cut it carefully and laid the pieces on his workbench, planning to sew them in the morning, then went to bed with a heavy sigh.

The next morning, the shoemaker rubbed his eyes and stared at his workbench. There, instead of cut leather, stood a finished pair of shoes, stitched so finely that no master craftsman could have done better. Before long a customer came in, admired the shoes at once, and paid a higher price than usual. With that money the shoemaker bought leather for two pairs of shoes.

That night he cut the leather again and left it on the bench, and again the next morning two perfect pairs of shoes were waiting for him. Day after day this went on, and the shoemaker's little shop grew busier and busier. He and his wife grew puzzled — and a little curious — about who could be helping them.

As the year drew toward Christmas, the wife said, "Why don't we stay awake tonight and see who has been so kind to us?" The shoemaker liked the idea. That night they blew out the candle, hid behind a curtain in the corner of the workshop, and waited quietly in the dark.

At midnight, two tiny elves came skipping in — one with a mop of straw-yellow hair, the other with curls of silvery grey. Both wore nothing but a few ragged scraps of leaf and cloth stitched crookedly together, and their little feet were bare. They hopped up onto the bench and set to work with needles and tiny hammers almost as big as themselves, stitching and tapping so quickly that the shoemaker and his wife could hardly follow their busy little hands. Before the first light of morning, the shoes stood finished, and the elves had vanished.

Full of gratitude, the shoemaker's wife said, "They have helped us so much, yet they go about in such thin, ragged little clothes, and the weather grows colder every day. Let me sew each of them a little shirt, a little coat, and a pair of little trousers." The shoemaker agreed at once. "And I will make each of them a tiny pair of shoes," he said. So the two of them worked late into the night, stitching away with as much care as the elves had ever shown them.

On the evening before Christmas, instead of leaving cut leather on the bench, they laid out the little clothes and the little shoes, then hid behind the curtain just as before. At midnight the two elves came skipping in again — and stopped short when they saw the gifts waiting for them. For a moment they simply stared, and then they laughed and clapped with delight. They pulled on their new shirts and coats and trousers, tugged on their tiny new shoes, and grinned at each other from ear to ear. Then, hand in hand, they danced merrily across the workbench and out through the door, vanishing into the night — and they never came back again.

The shoemaker and his wife never saw the little elves again, but from that night on, everything went well for them. Whenever they passed the workbench in the evening, they remembered the two happy little elves dancing away in their new clothes, and their hearts felt warm all over again.