The Slipper That Fits

A woodcutter found the slipper at dawn. He picked it up, turned it over in his hand, and did not know what to make of it. It was gold, but it was too small to be the shoe of any grown man, and too fine to be the toy of a child. He took it home and showed it to his wife, and she, who knew what was what, put it in a wooden box and said no more.

The word got out, as such words always do. Within a moon the slipper had changed hands three times, and at last it came to the court of the young king who had seen the girl at the festival. He took it in his hands and remembered the blue jacket and the quiet face. He would not let anyone else touch it.

He proclaimed, by the mouth of his herald, that the slipper belonged to a woman whose foot it had been made for; that no foot in his dominions should be left unmeasured until the woman was found; and that when she was found, she should be brought to him, and whatever she asked should be hers.

The women came. The wives of the chiefs, the daughters of the farmers, the dancing-girls from the market. They sat on the bench outside the king's hall and put their feet into the slipper. Some were too long; some too broad; some could not even get their toes inside. No one, not one, could draw the slipper on.

The king grew thoughtful. The slipper, he saw, was not made for the women of his court. It had been made for a foot small and light — the foot of a girl who walked, not on the stones of a city, but on the paths of a valley. He sent his heralds into the southern hills.

They came, at last, to the small house at the end of the lane. The stepmother, her eyes wide, brought out her own daughter, who sat on the bench and tried the slipper and could not force her heel within an inch of the heel of it. The heralds were about to go. Then one of them, looking round, saw Ye Xian, who had been standing in the doorway with a pitcher of water in her hands.

"And you, girl," he said, "will you try?"

The stepmother protested. The girl was a servant; she had been at home all day; she could not possibly be the woman. But Ye Xian had already set down the pitcher. She sat on the bench. She put out her foot, and the herald slipped the golden slipper onto it. It went on as though it had been waiting for her. It fitted.

She went home, under the eyes of the whole village, and put on the feather jacket. She came back down the lane, and the king, who had ridden out to meet her, looked at her face and knew her. He heard her story — the dead parents, the stepmother, the golden fish, the bones in the corner, the flight from the festival. He did not doubt a word of it. He took her back with him to his city, and there, in the proper season, he married her.

The stepmother and her daughter came to a bad end, as such women do in old stories: they were struck down, before the year was out, in the waste behind the house, by stones that fell out of an empty sky, and were buried where they fell. No one grieved for them. As for Ye Xian, she lived, by the river of her new home, long and happily; and the golden slippers, of which one had been lost and one had been found, were laid, when she died, beside her in the tomb. The story of the girl and her fish was told in the southern hills for eight hundred years before any tale like it was ever heard in the West.