A little girl shares her afternoon bowl of bread and milk with a snake that creeps from a crevice in the wall, and the creature repays her with "bright stones, pearls, and golden playthings" out of its hoard. Then the mother, seeing the snake at her child's dish, "ran out with a log of wood, and killed the good little creature". From that hour "a change came over the child": she "lost her pretty rosy cheeks and wasted away", and — the sign the address is filed under — "the funeral bird began to cry in the night", while the redbreast gathered "branches and leaves for a funeral garland" against the death to come.

The witness is the hundred-and-fifth of the brothers Grimm's Household Tales — Jacob (1785–1863) and Wilhelm (1786–1859) Grimm, whose collection (gathered 1812–1857; this English translation 1884) sets three short tales of snakes side by side. The funeral bird is a bird of ill-omen in the plainest sense: it foretells a death before the death arrives, its night-cry the audible shape of the child's decline. No species is named — only the funeral bird, the folk-word doing the work that augury does elsewhere.

The shelf is thin: beside this German tale the address holds only a reference to a German handbook of superstition, with no narrative behind it. When the one creature who loved the child is the one struck dead, why is it a bird, and not the mother, whose cry first names the loss?