Old Bob and his wife, Joan, lived by the market in the house where his father and grandfather and great-grandfather had lived before him, cobblers all of them, and cobbling was Bob’s trade too. Joan was a washerwoman, like her mother and her grandmother and her great-grandmother, back as far as anyone could remember.

   And if they’d had a son, he would have become a cobbler in his turn, and if they’d had a daughter, she would have learned the laundry trade, and so the world would have gone on. But they’d never had a child, whether boy or girl, and now they were getting old, and it seemed less and less likely that they ever would, much as they would have liked it.

   One evening as old Joan wrote a letter to her niece and old Bob sat trimming the heels of a pair of tiny scarlet slippers he was making for the love of it, there came a knock at the door.

   Bob looked up with a jump. “Was that someone knocking?” he said. “What’s the time?”

   The cuckoo clock answered him before Joan could: ten o’clock. As soon as it had finished cuckooing, there came another knock, louder than before.

   Bob lit a candle and went through the dark cobbler’s shop to unlock the front door.

   Standing in the moonlight was a little boy in a page’s uniform. It had once been smart, but it was sorely torn and stained, and the boy’s face was scratched and grubby.

   “Bless my soul!” said Bob. “Who are you?”

   “I was a rat,” said the little boy.