Creighton University

Lively reds and blues render these two fables.  The second is among Florian's wittiest: the miser father deserves his smarter talkback son!  What will this son become when he becomes the miser?!  Because people tend not to know the plots, I will summarize them briefly here.  In "The Child and the Looking-Glass," a child first smiles and then grimaces at a mirror, and gets angered by the grimaces he sees.  His mother catches him in his rage.  "If you smile, it will smile back.  Whatever you do, the image will do the same to you."  In the second fable, a miser buys apples and locks them away but likes to look at them.  Alas, some rot, and those he eats.  His famished son gets the key and eats a lot of them with two little friends.  "Give them back!" his father demands when he finds them out.  Son: "Don't worry, Dad.  We're all decent fellows.  We leave the bad apples for you to eat; we ate only the healthy ones."