Listen closely! We’re about to begin. And
when we reach the end of the tale, let’s hope we know
more than we do now, for it concerns an evil goblin, one
of the very worst – the Devil himself! One day, the Devil
was feeling mighty pleased with himself because he’d
made a special mirror. The mirror took anything that
was good or lovely and shrank it to almost nothing. But
if something was useless or bad, the mirror magnified
it and made it look even worse. The most charming
landscape looked like boiled spinach in the mirror,
while the nicest people turned nasty or stood on their
heads with their middles missing, and their faces so
twisted that nobody knew who they were. And if you
had a freckle, you could be sure that the mirror would
stretch it across your entire mouth and nose. “What a
hoot!” cried the Devil. If someone had a kind thought,
then a sneer would appear in the mirror, which made
the old goblin laugh at his own cunning. The goblins
who went to goblin school – for you see, the Devil ran
a goblin school – all chattered about the miracle. They
thought that now they could see what humans and the
world
really looked like. They ran everywhere with the
mirror and, in the end, there was not one person or
country that it didn’t twist out of shape.
Then the goblins decided to fly up to Heaven, to mock
the angels and God himself. The higher they flew with the
mirror, the harder it laughed, and they could barely hold
onto it. Higher and higher they flew, nearer and nearer
to God and the angels – and then the mirror shook so
hard with laughter that it slipped from their hands and
tumbled down to earth, where it shattered into millions
and billions of pieces.
That created more trouble than ever. Some pieces
were hardly bigger than a grain of sand, and they flew
all around the wide world – and whenever a piece got in
someone’s eye, it stuck fast. Then the person could only
see what was wrong with everything, because each of
these tiny bits had the same power as the whole mirror.
Some people also got a sliver of mirror in their hearts –
and that was truly terrible, because it turned their hearts
into lumps of ice. Sometimes a piece was large enough to
use as a windowpane; but it was no good looking at your
friends through a window like that. Other pieces ended
up in eyeglasses – and then it was awful when people put
them on in order to see and do things properly.
It all tickled the Devil so much that he roared with
laughter and his belly nearly split. All the while, more
and more tiny shards of glass were flying about in the air.
And now we’ll hear what happened next!
Copyright © 2021 by Hans Christian Andersen. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
