The Star Money

6-8 min read
16 pages

The star money, the Brothers Grimm tale to read aloud. A girl with nothing left but her shirt gives that away too, and then the sky opens.

There was a little girl whose father and mother had died, and she had no room to live in and no bed to sleep in, and nothing at all in the world except the clothes she had on and a piece of bread that somebody had given her.

She was good, though, and she had nobody left to be good for, so she went out into the open country and trusted that something would come of it.

On the road she met a poor man. «I'm so hungry,» he said. «Give me something to eat.» She gave him the whole piece of bread and said, «God bless it for you,» and went on.

Then a child came along, crying. «My head is so cold,» said the child. «Give me something to cover it.» So she took off her cap and gave it away.

She walked further and the wind got up. Another child came, without a jacket, shivering. She took off her own jacket and gave it to her.

A little further on, another asked for a dress, and she gave her dress away, and now she had only her shirt.

It got dark, and she came into a wood, and by then she had been walking a long time and had nothing left to give anyone.

One more child came out of the trees and asked for the shirt.

The girl thought: it is dark, and nobody can see me, and this child is cold. So she took off her shirt and gave that away too, and stood in the wood with nothing on at all.

And while she was standing there the stars began to come down out of the sky.

They fell around her on the moss, and where they landed they were not stars any more, but hard round coins of silver, more than she could count.

And she found that she was wearing a shift of the finest linen, which had not been there a moment before and which nobody had handed her.

She gathered the money up into it, and she had as much as she could hold.

She was not cold any longer, and she was not hungry, and for the first time since her mother died she was not frightened either.

She walked out of the wood at dawn with the shift full of silver, and she was rich for the rest of her life.

And she never afterwards found it difficult to give things away, because she had discovered something about it that most people never do.

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Text source: Plot by the Brothers Grimm (1812), public domain. The text was written anew for Marytale — it is not a reprint of anyone else's version.

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The Star Money

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