The Lovely Cottage
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Story 5 – The lovely cottage
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There was a clean, tidy, hard-working woman, who lived in a cottage in the village. She was most particular about keeping her house in order; she had a place for everything, and kept everything in its place.
Every night, before going to bed, she would brush up the ashes around the fireplace, put coal on the fire to keep it going all night, and sweep the floor. Her cottage was the cleanest home in Pentrefoelas!
One night, the fairies on their nightly walk around the village decided to enter her cottage. It was exactly the sort of place they liked, and they were delighted with the warm fire, the clean floor and hearth. They stayed all night and enjoyed themselves in the comfort of the lovely home.
In the morning, before the fairies left, they put a bright new shilling by the woman’s fireplace. Night after night they would visit the woman’s cottage, and every morning she picked up a shiny new shilling!
Before long the woman had quite a lot of money. She bought new clothes and new curtains, and made her cottage even nicer than it had been before.
Her neighbours noticed and became quite jealous. They started to gossip about her. One of them was determined to find out how the woman could suddenly afford all of these beautiful things for her home. The neighbour marched over to the woman’s house, and rudely asked where the money was coming from!
The woman told her neighbour that every morning when she woke up, she found a sparkling new shilling by her lovely clean fireplace. Her neighbour was annoyed and stormed off to tell her friends the story.
The next morning, the woman with the beautifully kept cottage woke up as usual, expecting to find a shilling. But there was no coin there! The next day it was the same … and the next.
You see, the fairies were offended that she had told their secret to her gossiping neighbour. They never returned to the homely cottage again.