THE SNOW QUEEN. -269
wrought. For now, they asserted, one could see, for the first
time, how the world and the people in it really looked. Now
they wanted to fly up to heaven, to sneer and scoff at the angels
themselves. The higher they flew with the mirror, the more it
grinned; they could scarcely hold it fast. They flew higher and
higher, and then the mirror trembled so terribly amid its grin-
ning that it fell down out of their hands to the earth, where it
was shattered into a hundred million million and more fragments.
And now this mirror occasioned much more unhappiness than
before; for some of the fragments were scarcely so large as a
barleycorn, and these flew about in the world, and whenever they
flew into any one’s eye they stuck there, and those people saw
everything wrongly, or had only eyes for the bad side of a thing,
for every little fragment.of the mirror had retained the power
which the whole glass possessed. A few persons even got a
fragment of the mirror into their hearts, and that was terrible
indeed, for such a heart became a block of ice. A few fragments
of the mirror were so large that they were used as window-panes,
but it was a bad thing to look at one’s friends through these
panes; other pieces were made into spectacles, and then it went
badly when people put on these spectacles to see rightly, and to
be just; and then the demon laughed till his paunch shook, for
it tickled him so. But without, some little fragments of glass
still floated about in the air—and now we shall hear.

THE SECOND STORY.
A Little Boy and a Little Girl.

In the great town, where there are many houses, and so many
people that there is not room enough for every one to have a little
garden, and where consequently most persons are compelled to
be content with some flowers in flower-pots, were two poor children
who possessed a garden somewhat larger than a flower-pot. They
were not brother and sister, but they loved each other quite as
much as if they had been. Their parents lived just opposite each
other in two garrets, there where the roof of one neighbout’s house
joined that of another; and where the water-pipe ran between
the two houses was a little window; one had only to step across
the pipe to get from one window to the other.

The parents of each child had a great box, in which grew kitchen
herbs that they used, and a little rose bush; there was one in
each box, and they grew famously. Now, it occurred to the
parents to place the boxes across the pipe, so that they reached
from one window to another, and looked quite like two embank-
ments of flowers. Pea plants hung down over the boxes, and
the rose bushes shot forth long twigs, which clustered round the
windows and bent down towards each other ; it was almost like