Once a certain painter found an elliptical piece ofd clear glass. "How beautiful it is! I think I'll keep it!" he exclaimed. He took it to his shop thinking it might prove to be of some use later.

One day he accidentally upset a tin of silvery white paint on the glass.

"Oh God! I've spoilt the pretty piece of glass," he thought. He was too busy that day, so he just cast it aside, thinking he would throw it away later, for it was of no use any more.


After a week, when his work was finished, he picked up the piece of glass to throw it away. The paint had dried on the top.

"I wonder if the paint has flowed down and smeared the other side as well," he thought. Just to satisfy his curiosity he turned the glass piece over and froze in surprise. Looking at him from the glass was a man like himself. "Where did you come from?" he cried out. "You were not there when I found this glass piece. There was no reply, but the man in the glass opened and shut his mouth.


He shook his head and waved his arms, just to frighten him away, but the mysterious man lurking in the glass copied his action. "He just means to be rude and annoy me by aping me and making fun of me," he thought.

"How did he get inside?" he began to wonder, as he thought that it was a real, living man.

He hid the piece of glass carefully in his cash drawer. He looked at it every day to see if the strange intruder would go away as miraculously as he had come.


This was secretly noticed by his wife. She watched him looking into an alliptical piece of glass daily. She was dying to know what he looked at.

"It looks just an ordinary piece of glass - why should he peep into it daily?" she asked herself a hundred times every day, but could think of no reasonable explanation.

One day, when he was not in the shop, she stealthily opened the drawerand took out the piece of glass that had so bewitched her husband that he just had to
peer into it daily. She was surprised when she saw a 'living' young woman inside.

"Oh, so that's what he looks at!" she exclaimed in anger.

She thought to herself, "But how did the woman get into the glass? And how can one live without food and water? Perhaps she steals money from the chest where it is always kept. May be she goes out at night and returns before dawn."
That afternoon the neighbours heard the couple shouting at each other. The quarrel was carried to a great pitch, with the word GLASS being mentioned again and again. They came to enquire about the cause of the fight, and were amazed to hear that the centre of all the acrimony was just a piece of glass.

"How can one live inside a piece of glass?" asked a boy. He looked into it and was startled to see another boy looking back at him!

Then the three of them began to argue whether it was a man or a woman or a boy inside that accursed object. At last came a wise man.

He took the piece of glass and carefully examined it. He put various objects in front of it. Lo, the glass showed whatever was before it, whether a spoon or a pencil or a tomato.

He explained that it was a magic glass. It would the show an image of whoever faced it.

"But the glass was not magic when I found it. It turned into a magic glass only after I spilled the paint on it," said the painter.

"Right, when the glass was clear on both sides, light could easily pass through it. Now with the paint on one surface, the light bumps against it and comes back with a view of whatever is in front."

"Like a ball bouncing when it hits the floor!" interjected the boy.

"Exactly. The ground does not allow the ball to pass through, and the paint does not allow the light to pass. So the light is turned back from the glass in much the same way as the sound is turned back from a hill to produce an echo!"

The turning back bouncing back was later called reflection.


That was the first mirror, and the painter was flooded with orders to smear paint on the back of flat pieces of glass and make mirrors.

People believed that mirror always showed a true image, until something happened. That's the next story.