rm you,' said Gyp courteously.

Yellow-cap did as he was desired. The reflection in the glass lifted
the corresponding finger and laid it beside the nose of no other than
the central head.

'Would you mind winking your left eye?' continued Gyp.

Yellow-cap did so. The central head alone winked back.

'Now you might stick out your tongue,' suggested Gyp.

Yellow-cap tried this experiment also: the seventh head was the only
one that imitated the gesture.

'This is absurd,' exclaimed Yellow-cap indignantly. 'The central head
imitates everything I do; it even pretends to look like me, which is
ridiculous, for it is ugly, while I am----'

'Perhaps you have never looked in a mirror before?' said Gyp gently.

'Yes, I have--in tin pans,' returned Yellow-cap warmly.

'Tin pans are untrustworthy,' said Gyp. 'This is the best mirror in
the world, and that is the reason why it is in the shape of an eye,
without any face belonging to it.'

'I should think you would be the last people in the world to want a
good mirror, or any mirror at all!' exclaimed Yellow-cap testily.

'We don't want it--and that is why we have it. We call it our eyesore;
and it is the eye of our destiny. Look again.'

'What is this?' muttered Yellow-cap. 'All the heads are melting into
one another; now they are all swallowed up in the central head; and
now that head looks more like me than ever, and yet uglier; and
now--why, it looks like the old dwarf I carried across the river,
and--which am I?'

He turned round, and, behold! the six Brethren were seated each one in
his place at the table, smoking and drinking as gravely as ever, and
looking as if they had never once stirred from their chairs. Glancing
back at the mirror, he saw that it had returned to its former
unreflecting condition, only a few vanishing shadows being yet visible
in its black depths.

'It certainly is different from a tin pan,' thought he as he went back
to his chair at the head of the table.

'Nothing more than an optical illusion,' said Gyp, filling
Yellow-cap's pipe from his own tobacco-pouch, and handing it to him
courteously. 'There is no harm in it--none at all.'

'Especially as it makes you our Head,' observed Ruba.

'I move we suspend the rules,' said Dubb.

'I second that motion,' said Dubsix.

'We mustn't put our feet into our business,' remarked Menin in an
explanatory way.

'The only rule we never suspend is the rule that no rule shall not
sometimes be