Three Wishes, Three Gifts

Three Wishes, Three Gifts is the imp’s governing rule for wish-making: a human who asks for three wishes must give him three gifts. The imp makes the formula sound like a simple exchange, but its force lies in what the human does not yet know. The father gives up valuable objects, swears that his third gift will not be his soul, and promises before discovering what the imp intends to demand. That concealed cost becomes a claim on his future child, turning a comic negotiation into the source of Della’s danger.

The Rule and Its Bargain

The rule is announced after the father begins to ask for his three wishes. The imp interrupts the request with “Three wishes, three gifts,” repeats the formula when challenged, and insists that the father’s witch should have warned him. His stamping foot and complaint that humans cannot calculate give the exchange a deliberately childish surface. Yet the repeated terms establish the point that matters: the wishes are not free, and the gifts are not left entirely to the human’s judgment.

The father accepts the demand for a necklace and a ring, protesting that they are his before yielding them. When the imp asks for the third gift, the father tries to set a limit: “Be it anything but my soul.” The imp does not immediately disclose what he wants. Instead, he tests the father’s commitment, asking him to swear on his third toe and then by the hairs of his chinny chin chin. The father agrees, and the imp seals the promise with “No takebacks, no substitutions.” By the time the father offers his remaining worldly possessions, the crucial question is no longer whether he will give a third gift, but what he has already authorized the imp to claim.

That distinction makes the bargain asymmetrical. The father knows he is promising something, but not what the imp will name as the promised gift. The imp, by contrast, makes certainty itself part of the exchange: repeated vows and the no-substitutions clause shut down later attempts to revise an agreement whose terms have not been fully revealed. The story’s phrase for a three-part exchange therefore describes both its arithmetic and its trap.

What the Wishes and Gifts Cost

The father later recounts that he used his first wish to obtain knowledge of how to acquire wealth rather than wealth itself. The distinction matters: he chooses the means to prosper, and the wish enables him to find treasure in the imp’s cave. His wife sees this as evidence of cleverness, not merely luck. She describes him as clever enough to use that first wish for knowledge and his third wish to send the imp back into the lamp, where he would be imprisoned again.

The third wish, however, does not erase the third promise. The father explains that after he wished the imp back into the lamp, the imp threw a tantrum and demanded his firstborn child. The father says he had tried to reason with him about that demand, but the imp would not accept another bargain. His earlier promise has thus become a claim on Della, despite the father’s attempt to end the danger by returning the imp to confinement. His wife calls his acceptance of a third promise before learning its content foolishness; the father himself repeats that judgment, contrasting the cleverness of his wishes with his failure to secure the bargain’s terms.

The necklace and ring also acquire a continuing role as proof of the imp’s claim. The father tells his wife that the imp has both his mother’s necklace and his father’s ring, and that their possession means Della will be fully his once she turns twenty-one. The threat is not limited to taking Della: the father says that everything she is to inherit will pass to the imp when he claims her. The original gifts therefore bind together the family’s inheritance, Della’s future, and the promise made before the father knew what it would cost.

The Claim on Della

The father’s account gives the bargain a deadline and a consequence. The imp’s hold is already beginning to affect Della, and the father fears that she will soon forget who she is altogether. When she turns twenty-one, the imp intends to claim her under the agreement, with the inheritance passing to him as well. The rule that began as a dispute over three gifts has become a supernatural threat to a person who was not yet born when the promise was made.

The father and his wife do not know why the imp wants the treasure he could apparently make for himself. The wife speculates that he may be able to spin straw only into fairy gold and wonders whether Della, rather than the treasure, is the real object of his desire. The father resists that explanation: Della was not yet born when the bargain was struck, and he suspects the imp’s plan has something to do with the inheritance. The uncertainty does not weaken the danger. It shows that even the people bound by the bargain cannot confidently explain the imp’s purpose or the full design behind his demand.

The account also clarifies the difference between a wish and a bargain. The father can use a wish strategically, gaining knowledge and later returning the imp to the lamp. But the wish does not give him an equivalent power to cancel a promise made under the imp’s rule. The imp’s tantrum and refusal to accept a revised bargain make the terms feel less like a negotiation between equals than a trap that remains effective after the immediate encounter ends.

Gifts, Consent, and the Rule’s Reversal

The story eventually sets the imp’s accounting against a different understanding of what a gift can mean. When Tad identifies “the greatest gift of all,” the imp’s sister, Paribanou, realizes that he had promised someone true love and accuses him of cheating. The imp answers that nobody will give him what he wants; Tante Iezavel responds that what he wants is absurd. Their exchange exposes the rule’s moral imbalance: the imp demands gifts from humans while pursuing something that cannot be secured through the same coercive terms.

The contrast is made most clearly through Zaen and Della. Zaen has proposed to her a thousand times, but his repeated declarations have not convinced her that he understands or trusts her. He gives her a friendship bracelet rather than gold or jewels. Its white horsehair recalls the first pony Della received; its red recalls the stallion that threw her and the moment she first smiled at Zaen after he caught her; its black comes from the mare he gave her, and its beads bear their initials. Zaen explains the memories embodied in the bracelet and says that he made it because no amount of gold or jewels could express what she meant to him.

Della tells him that what she wanted was someone willing to trust her with everything he did not have, and to believe she could love him in return. She had not wanted to be treated as a prize or trophy, and the thousand proposals had not shown her that Zaen understood how she saw herself. His gift changes the terms of their relationship because it expresses their shared history rather than attempting to purchase her affection. Della accepts him without gold or jewels, provided he will first and forever be her dearest friend; Zaen asks her to be his friend for life and to marry him. Their freely offered and freely accepted promise stands against the imp’s “No takebacks, no substitutions”: love is not made valid by forcing someone to honor an undisclosed price.

Narrative Significance

The rule supplies the machinery behind Della’s peril and gives the tale a durable contrast between formal obligation and meaningful exchange. Its simple count—three wishes, three gifts—sounds balanced, but the father’s consent is compromised by the imp’s withholding of the third gift’s identity. The consequences persist through the necklace, the ring, Della’s approaching twenty-first birthday, and the threatened loss of her inheritance. The rule is therefore not a decorative feature of the wish scene; it is the cause that links the father’s choices to Della’s later danger.

At the same time, the story does not treat all gifts as equivalent. The imp’s bargains turn objects and promises into leverage, whereas Zaen’s bracelet draws its value from remembered events and his willingness to entrust Della with what he does not possess. The eventual emphasis on true love as “the greatest gift of all” shifts the meaning of the rule’s central word. A gift can be demanded as the price of a wish, or offered as an expression of friendship and trust; only the latter leaves the recipient free to answer. Through that distinction, the rule that creates the crisis also sharpens the story’s final measure of what a genuine gift is worth.