There was once a wicked troll who was more wicked than anybody else. One day he was in a very happy frame of mind for he had just constructed a mirror that made everything good and beautiful shrink up to nothing when it was reflected in it, but all those things that were ugly and useless were magnified and made to appear ten times worse than before. In this mirror, the loveliest landscapes looked like boiled spinach and the most beautiful people appeared odious. Their features were so distorted that their friends could never recognize them. Moreover, if one of them had a freckle it seemed to spread right over his nose and mouth; and if a good thought glanced across his mind, a wrinkle was seen in the mirror. The troll thought all this was highly entertaining, and he chuckled at his clever work.
The goblins who studied at the school of magic where he taught spread the fame of this wonderful mirror, and said that for the first time the world and its inhabitants could be seen as they really were. They carried the mirror from place to place, until at last there was no country or person that had not been misrepresented in it. Then they flew up to the sky with it, to see if they could carry on their fun there. But the higher they flew, the more wrinkled the mirror became; they could scarcely hold it together. They flew on and on, higher and higher, until at last the mirror trembled so much that it escaped from their hands and fell to the earth, breaking into a million, billion little pieces. And then it caused far greater unhappiness than before, for fragments of it scarcely as large as grains of sand flew about in the air and got into people's eyes, making them see everything the wrong way and have eyes only for what was perverted and corrupt. For each little fragment retained the peculiar properties of the whole mirror. Some people were unfortunate enough to get little splinters into their hearts and that was disastrous for their hearts became cold and hard, like lumps of ice. The wicked troll was greatly amused with all this and he laughed till his sides ached.
Very soon we shall hear more about some of the little splinters of this mischievous mirror which were flying about in the air.
