The young couple were in the second year of their marriage, and the baby, their first son, was little more than a fortnight old. While the limpets cooked, the wife went about her work, glancing now and then at the cradle. Suddenly she heard a strange voice. The baby was sitting up, staring at the hearth, and saying in amazement: "I'm not of this year, nor the year before, Nor yet of the time of King John of yore, But in all my days and years, I ween, So many pots boiling I never have seen."
She had heard old women say that fairies sometimes stole a sleeping baby and left one of their own, and that the way to get the real child back was to throw the changeling on the hearth, because the fairy mother could not bear its cries. She grabbed the creature, which knew what was coming and let out a fearful yell. At once the fairy mother came, leaping clean over the hecq, the half-door, without stopping to lift the latch, handed back the real baby unharmed, snatched up her own screaming child, and went out the way she had come.
Edith Carey printed a very close Breton parallel in which the pots are eggshells with little sticks bubbling in them, and the fairy in the loft calls down "Don't kill mine and I won't kill yours". The L'Erée version is a local setting of a widespread tale. The map point marks L'Erée.
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