Attention, please, we’re going to begin. When we go to the end of the story we shall know more than we do now. Once there was a wicked troll. He had made a looking-glass which had this property: everything good and pretty that was reflected in it became bad and ugly. And everything that was no good became even worse. The most beautiful landscapes looked like boiled spinach, and the best of men looked bad. Their faces were so ugly that they couldn’t be recognized. It was very funny, the troll said. He couldn’t stop laughing at his clever invention. Everyone who visited the troll school (for he kept a troll school) told the news all about that miracle looking-glass: you could now see, they said, what the world and people really looked like. They ran everywhere with the glass, and at last there wasn’t a country or a person left who hadn’t been distorted in it. After that they decided to fly up to heaven itself and make fun of the angels. The higher they few with the glass, the more it grimaced. Up and up they few, and then the glass grimaced so hard that it fell out of their hands and to the ground. It broke into millions of little pieces. Some of them were as big as a grain of sand. They few around the wide world, and when they got into peoples’ eyes, they stuck there, and from that moment the people saw everything distorted and only looked for the bad things.

Every little splinter of the glass had the same power that the whole glass had. Some people got a little bit of the glass into their hearts, and that was horrible, for their hearts became just like ice. Some of the pieces were so big that they were used for window glass. Other pieces were made into glasses, and that was a bad thing, if people put them on to see correctly and judge rightly. The evil troll laughed at this, for it was very amusing to him. And out in the world little bits of glass were still flying in the air.

Now you shall hear what happened with some of them.

Словарные слова:

wicked

– злой

property

– свойство

reflect

– отражаться

landscape

– ландшафт

recognize

– узнать