The Magicians Show Box and Other Stories | Page 7

to me must be right. He said that, once clasped, it could only be
loosened by dipping it into a hidden fountain. What fountain it is I do
not know; but some old priest, who lives in a town on the mouth of a
river, knows."
This was discouraging for Rosamond, there are so many towns and
rivers, and so many old priests, in the world. She looked on the map,
and thought it must be Paris, for that is not so very far from the sea, and
there they know every thing. So, with her mother's leave, and some
jewels she gave her, she went off to Paris, taking a bit of the mirror set
in a gilt frame. When she arrived there, what was her surprise to find
the city entirely inhabited by birds and animals! Parrots and peacocks
prevailed, but ospreys and jackdaws, vultures and cormorants, crows
and cockerels, and many, many other kinds of birds were also fluttering
about, making a perpetual whizzing. Then there were hundreds of
monkeys, all jauntily dressed, with little canes in their hands, and a
great many camels and spaniels, and other animals, wild and tame, in
neat linen blouses. What bewildered her still more, was to see that they
were all skating about on the thinnest possible ice. Why it did not crack,
to let them all through, she could not imagine. At first she was afraid
even to set her foot upon it, but soon found herself skating merrily
about, enjoying it as much as any of them. Another queer thing was,
that, reflected in the ice, all these birds and animals appeared to be men
and women; and she saw that in her own reflection she was a nice little
girl. She wondered how she looked in her mirror, and took it out to see.
"What kind of an animal am I?" she exclaimed. "O, I see--an ibex.
What neat little horns, and how bright my eyes are! What would Alfred
say if he knew I was an ibex?"
She called out to the skaters to ask them if they would look into her
glass. "Hand it here," answered one, who in the ice appeared very pale,
thin, and respectable. "I am a philosopher; I am not afraid of the truth."
He looked in, and lo, there was a stork, standing on one leg, with his
eyes half closed, and his head neatly tucked under his wing. "What a
caricature!" he exclaimed, giving the glass a toss. It fell upon the
ermine muff of a furbelowed old dowager, who was skating bravely
about, notwithstanding her seventy years. "I will see how I look," she
said, with a simpering smile; and behold, there was a puffy white owl
in the mirror. Down fell the glass, but Rosamond caught and saved it.

"What a little unfledged thing you are, to be carrying that bit of broken
glass about with you!" called out the philosopher.
"Better be unfledged than a one-eyed stork," answered Rosamond, and
skated swiftly out of sight.
Now, the grandest skater of all was a griffin, who led all the others,
skating more skilfully than any of them, and flitting like mad across the
very thinnest places. It made one's head giddy to see him. His swiftness
and dexterity, and a knack he had of knocking the other skaters into
great black holes under the ice, whenever they crossed his path, greatly
imposed upon them, and they all took care to follow straight behind, or
to keep well out of his way. Now and then a bear would growl as he
glided by; but the next day, Rosamond would see that bear hard at work
building ice palaces, too busy to growl. One day, skating off into a
corner, she found the griffin sitting apart, behind a great block of ice
with his claws crossed, and looking very cold and dreary, like a snow
image. "Would you not like to take a peep into my glass?" she said to
him, quite amiably.
"No, child," solemnly answered the griffin. "I know by your ironical
smile that you have discovered the truth--that I am nothing but a griffin.
But if the skaters believe in me, why undeceive them? Why should
magpies and zebras have any thing better to reign over them?"
"But do you not see how thin the ice is? You will surely break through
some day."
"I know it," he replied. "A good strong trampling, and we are all
scattered far and wide. But I keep the tigers and hyenas at work, and
the more sagacious elephants bear their burdens in quiet, and let me
alone. If there be a lion among them, he roars so gently it does no harm.
And you must be a good girl, and