about my reflection in the looking-glass?"
"No," answered Jimmieboy. "He didn't say anything about it."
"That's queer. The story is in rhyme, and the major always tells everybody all the poetry he knows," said the invisible enemy. "That's why I never go near him. He has only enough to last one year, and the second year he tells it all over again. I'm surprised he never told you about my reflection in the mirror, because it is one of his worst, and he always likes them better than the others."
"I'll ask him to tell it to me next time I see him," said Jimmieboy, "unless you'll tell it to me now."
"I'd just as lief tell you," said the Parallelopipedon. "Only you mustn't laugh or cry, because you haven't time to laugh, and generals never cry. This is the way it goes:
The Parallelopipedon so very ugly is,
His own heart fills with terror when he looks upon his phiz.
That's why he wears blue goggles – twenty pairs upon his nose,
And never dares to show himself, no matter where he goes.
One day when he was walking down a crowded village street,
He looked into a little shop where stood a mirror neat.
He saw his own reflection there as plain as plain could be;
And said, 'I'd give four dollars if that really wasn't me.'
And, strange to say, the figure in the mirror's silver face
Was also filled with terror at the other's lack of grace;
And this reflection trembled till it strangely came to pass
The handsome mirror shivered to ten thousand bits of glass.
To this tale there's a moral, and that moral briefly is:
If you perchance are burdened with a terrifying phiz,
Don't look into your mirror – 'tis a fearful risk to take —
'Tis certain sure to happen that the mirror it will break."
"Well, if that's so, I guess I don't want to see you," said Jimmieboy. "I only like pretty things. But tell me; if all this is true, how did the major come to say it? I thought he couldn't tell the truth."
"That's only as a rule. Rules have exceptions. For instance," explained the Parallelopipedon, "as a rule I can't pronounce my name, but in reciting that poem to you I did speak my name in the very first line – but if you only knew how it hurt me to do it! Oh dear me, how it hurt! Did you ever have a tooth pulled?"
"Once," said Jimmieboy, wincing at the remembrance of his painful experience.
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