It's getting late, so I can't really offer detailed critique at this time.
Overall, I like it. A good original fairy tale. Good pacing and written in a story-teller's style. There were one or two sentences that were phrased a little awkwardly for me (eg. "And while the man was so poor he barely could scrape together enough food to feed himself"; "could barely" rather than "barely could" sounds a bit better to my ear). I'm also not a huge fan of "once upon a time" as an opening, even if it is a fairy tale, but that's just a subjective stylistic choice.
(Tangential, but here's an interesting read that came to mind:
http://airshipdaily.com/blog/06242014-origin-of-cliches )
On another note, I've enjoyed several of the illustrated tales on Arania's site, so nice work!