A woman who longed for a child of her own once sought out an old witch, who gave her a single barleycorn to plant in a flowerpot. No sooner was it in the soil than it sprang up into a great flower, shaped like a tulip and shut fast as a bud. When the woman kissed its petals, the flower opened with a soft sigh, and there in the heart of it sat a tiny girl, no taller than a thumb. The woman named her Thumbelina.
Thumbelina slept in a walnut shell, rowed across a plate of water in a tulip petal, and sang more sweetly than anyone had ever heard. But her smallness made her precious to creatures who had no right to her. In the dead of night a fat, dripping toad crept in and carried her off to the river, meaning her to marry its clumsy son. The little fish, pitying her, gnawed through the lily pad she stood upon and set her drifting free.
So began a long season of wandering. A beetle snatched her up and then, ashamed of her among his own kind, abandoned her in the wood. Summer passed and the cold came on, and Thumbelina, shivering and half starved, found shelter at last in the burrow of a field mouse.
The mouse was kind enough, but she had arranged a match for the girl with her neighbour, a rich and solemn mole who lived in the dark and cared nothing for sunlight or song. Thumbelina, who loved both, felt her heart grow heavy at the thought.
In the mole’s tunnel she found a swallow lying cold and still, given up for dead. Yet she would not leave him so. All winter she crept out to warm him and feed him, and slowly, under her care, his heart began to beat once more. When spring came, the swallow rose whole and grateful into the air — and this time, when he offered to carry her away, she climbed onto his back and held fast.
He bore her far to the south, to a country of endless flowers, and set her down upon a white blossom. There, in the cup of it, sat a tiny king no bigger than herself, with a gold crown and wings of gossamer, ruler of all the flower-folk. He had never seen anyone so lovely, and she had never seen anyone her own size. They were married among the petals, and the swallow sang at their wedding before flying on to tell the tale.
Kindness given freely, even to the cold and the forgotten, has a way of returning on brighter wings.