Three sisters are sent one after another into the great forest, and each comes at nightfall to the same little hut and its old man with the snow-white beard, St. Joseph, who asks each in turn for a share of her supper. The youngest, "a pious, good child", gives him more than she keeps and wakes to a bag of gold; the middle daughter fares nearly as well. But the eldest, "rude and wicked", eats "nearly the whole of it" and leaves the old man to scrape the dish. Our one German witness — the Grimms' Household Tales (collected 1812–1857; this translation 1884), filed there as No. 201 — keeps her strange reward for the morning after.

Groping behind the door for a money-bag of her own, she stoops to something on the ground she cannot make out, and it fastens onto her: "it was a second nose", grown fast to her own and stretched so far she is "forced to see it always on her nose". Screaming and howling does no good; she runs through the wood until she reaches St. Joseph, falls at his feet, and only "out of pity" does he take the nose away and give her "two farthings" besides. Even then she lies to her mother about a bag of gold lost on the road, and when the two go to hunt for it "so many lizards and snakes broke loose" that in the end they "stung the wicked child to death".

The whole address rests on this lone German tale — a single witness, but a whole one, with no gap needing apology. What stays with a reader is the form the marvel takes: not a lost limb or a beast's head but a second nose, doubled onto the greedy face as though the fault had only been made plain. Why should the price of grasping for too much be, of all things, more of the very feature that bends the eye toward the ground?