Which describes a looking-glass and the broken fragments.
You must attend to the commencement of this story, for when we get
to the end we shall know more than we do now about a very wicked
hobgoblin; he was one of the very worst, for he was a real demon.
One day, when he was in a merry mood, he made a looking-glass which
had the power of making everything good or beautiful that was
reflected in it almost shrink to nothing, while everything that was
worthless and bad looked increased in size and worse than ever. The
most lovely landscapes appeared like boiled spinach, and the people
became hideous, and looked as if they stood on their heads and had
no bodies. Their countenances were so distorted that no one could
recognize them, and even one freckle on the face appeared to spread
over the whole of the nose and mouth. The demon said this was very
amusing. When a good or pious thought passed through the mind of any
one it was misrepresented in the glass; and then how the demon laughed
at his cunning invention. All who went to the demon's school--for he
kept a school--talked everywhere of the wonders they had seen, and
declared that people could now, for the first time, see what the world
and 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.