A shivering old woman stands begging at a door, and the whole small drama turns on what a warm fire ought to draw out of a person. In the brief Grimm fragment behind this address (collected 1812–1857; this English rendering 1884), the beggar-woman goes from house to house, and when she is given anything she says only, "May God reward you". At one threshold a "friendly rogue of a boy" is warming himself, and he calls to her kindly: "Come, old mother, and warm yourself". She comes in — but stands too close, "so that her old rags began to burn", and does not notice.

The served text hangs its whole weight on the boy's failure, not on any rescue. The teller insists he owed her more than shelter: "he ought to have put the flames out", and lacking water "then should he have wept all the water in his body out of his eyes", tears enough to make "two pretty streams" to quench the burning rags. It is a fragment about the help an old beggar-woman should have received and did not — the succor withheld at the very hearth that endangered her — rather than a scene of help freely given.

Stith Thompson (1885–1976), the American folklorist whose motif-index assigns this number, files the shape under help from the old beggar woman, but only this one short Grimm witness is wired to served text; the German handbook citation beside it waits unread. The record here is thin, a single splinter of a longer tale. What is the boy meant to have learned from the woman he almost let burn?