A servant-girl, the only soul to survive when robbers fall upon her travelling party in a great forest, seats herself under a tree and gives herself into God's keeping. A white dove comes flying to her with "a little golden key" in its mouth and tells her that within a certain great tree "therein is a little lock", and "it opens with the tiny key". She opens it and finds "milk in a little dish" and "white bread to break into it". At the dove's word a second tree yields — "thou wilt find a bed" — a beautiful white bed; a third holds garments "beset with gold and with jewels", more splendid than any king's daughter's. For a while the trees are larder, bedchamber, and wardrobe, and the dove brings her all she needs.

The enchantment runs deeper than provision. After she has fetched a plain ring from a witch's house, she leans against a tree to wait, and it seems "the tree was soft and pliant"; "the branches twined around her" and became two arms, and "the tree was a handsome man", a king's son who embraces her. The witch, he says, "changed me into a tree"; "every day for two hours I was a white dove", and while she held the ring "I could not regain my human form". His servants and horses, "likewise been changed into trees", are freed along with him and stand at his side.

Only this German witness is wired to served text on our shelf. Thompson's magic trees reach to Persia and China, to the Zulu and the Seneca, to Indonesian and Quiché authorities — all of them waiting unread behind this single dove. What the tale makes strange is that the marvellous tree is not a source of fruit or oracle but a person under a spell, a man kept as timber until a plain ring lets him step out of his own bark. If the wonderful tree was someone all along, what are we to make of the ordinary trees of the wood?