'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.