mankind were really like. They carried the glass about everywhere, till at
last there was not a land nor a people who had not been looked at through
this distorted mirror. They wanted even to fly with it up to heaven to see the
angels, but the higher they flew the more slippery the glass became, and
they could scarcely hold it, till at last it slipped from their hands, fell to the
earth, and was broken into millions of pieces. But now the looking-glass
caused more unhappiness than ever, for some of the fragments were not so
large as a grain of sand, and they flew about the world into every country.
When one of these tiny atoms flew into a person’s eye, it stuck there
unknown to him, and from that moment he saw everything through a
distorted medium, or could see only the worst side of what he looked at, for
even the smallest fragment retained the same power which had belonged to
the whole mirror. Some few persons even got a fragment of the looking-
glass in their hearts, and this was very terrible, for their hearts became cold
like a lump of ice. A few of the pieces were so large that they could be used
as window-panes; it would have been a sad thing to look at our friends
through them. Other pieces were made into spectacles; this was dreadful for
those who wore them, for they could see nothing either rightly or justly. At
all this the wicked demon laughed till his sides shook-it tickled him so to
see the mischief he had done. There were still a number of these little
fragments of glass floating about in the air, and now you shall hear what
happened with one of them.
Second Story: A Little Boy and a Little Girl
In a large town, full of houses and people, there is not room for
everybody to have even a little garden, therefore they are obliged to be
satisfied with a few flowers in flower-pots. In one of these large towns lived
two poor children who had a garden something larger and better than a few
flower-pots. They were not brother and sister, but they loved each other
almost as much as if they had been. Their parents lived opposite to each
other in two garrets, where the roofs of neighboring houses projected out
towards each other and the water-pipe ran between them. In each house was
a little window, so that any one could step across the gutter from one
