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found the catalog entry of the Butterfly Mirror, which was seized at once and removed from the harem.  Suicide spread like wildfire through the concubinage.
    It was after Pilander’s return to Britain that the mirror suffered its first mishap.  The queen, though fascinated by the Sultan’s gift, felt it unseemly for a woman of her station to portray a modicum of vanity.  Thus the much-coveted artifact was awarded to Pilander, who had, with much effort, secured the use of a small dock facing the East African coast, for the Royal Navy.  Dr. Pilander, not knowing quite what to do with the mirror, donated it to Tearsham Group, the exclusive men’s club to which he belonged, where it stood under the mounted heads of various specimens of African wildlife entirely inappropriate in their proximity to an object of such beauty.
    As was mentioned earlier, this Dr. Phineas Pilander proved to be quite a scoundrel.  His company might be to blame.  At least one of this companions proved the undoing of three-hundred-odd years of attention and upkeep to what can only be described as a marvel of invention and art: Sir Robert Yurr.
    Sir Robert had been knighted for an act of bravery that he did not commit.  While masses of poverty stricken family men languished in British prisons under false charges, Sir Robert found himself, despite his best efforts, in a rich and upright social standing that he clearly did not deserve.  Yurr was a thug by trade.  A strapping brute of a man who delighted in the squirmings and whimperings of a victim up against a wet, dirty wall.  It was on one of his nightly forays into the alleyway shadows of Brixton that he happened on a mugging in process.  The muggee was a young, effeminate Prince Edward.  But more interesting to Yurr, the muggers were a pair of gypsies who had swindled him out of a box of cigars some months earlier.  The constabulary arrived in time to see Yurr triumphant, standing atop the unconscious forms of the gypsy twins, the young prince bruised and faint, but alive and well.  The timely arrival of the police might well have saved the prince’s life.  The gypsies were jailed, Yurr knighted, and Prince Edward  never found the pouch of coin that somehow ended up in Yurr’s noble pockets.
    After receiving his knighthood, Sir Robert became an object of adoration to the semi-male androgynes of the lower-upper class, who lauded his toughness and rough charisma.  He was invited to hunt in Africa (hence the trophy heads at the Tearsham Group), India, Australia, and the American west, where he proved a cunning and ruthless hunter. Yurr tolerated the daintiness of his benefactors for the sake of the hunt, but despised the chalky paleness of those philanthropists who toadied to his favor.  In ways, one might say he was like a coy mistress . . . but not.
    In time this inner contradiction reached a boiling point.  One day, torn between lone-wolf manliness, on one hand, and financial dependence on those he despised, on the other, Yurr went to an obscure corner of the Tearsham Group for a self-assessment.  There he proposed to sort out his feelings and rediscover his true self, money be damned.
    He did not like what he saw in the mirror.
    The glass suffered its first breakage, while Sir Robert suffered severe cuts to his ulotrichous knuckles.  Both Yurr and the butterfly mirror were removed from position and deposited on the street outside the Tearsham Group.  Here the two parted ways: Yurr returning to a life of thuggery, the mirror being picked up by William John Morrison, a doyen of the arts and crafts movement.
    William John Morrison (never merely “Mr. Morrison” or “William” or even – God forbid – “Bill”) was an artist who specialized in stained glass and miniatures paintings.  His quite-capable reconstruction of The Butterfly Mirror was only marred by two facts: 1) the soldering with which he bound the amber shards back together divided the mirror’s face into some