The plot follows a country doctor's hapless struggle to attend a sick young boy on a cold winter's night. A series of surreal events occur in the process, including the appearance of a mysterious groom (stablehand) in a pig shed.

It begins with the doctor having to urgently attend a sick patient, but his sole horse died the night before, so his maid Rosa goes off to ask for another. She returns empty-handed — "Of course, who is now going to lend her his horse for such a journey?" —, but, just as the doctor is expressing his distraction and torment by kicking at the cracked sty door, a mysterious groom appears and supplies him with a team of magnificent horses. The groom, being the oaf that he is, boorishly kisses the maid when she tries to hand him a harness, leaving her cheek with two rows of red tooth marks. The doctor scolds him furiously but quickly realizes that he is in his debt and, on the groom's beckoning, jumps happily into the gig. The groom declines to travel with him, preferring to stay with the terrified Rosa, who dashes into the house and makes every effort to secure herself, although her fate is inevitable. The doctor can do nothing to stop the groom, who, with a simple "Giddy up!", sends the horses on their way. The doctor is almost instantly transported to his sick patient's courtyard. It is, he says, "as if the farm yard of my invalid opens up immediately in front of my courtyard gate", when, in reality (insofar as that term may be applied to this story), it is all of ten miles away.