Immediately when it began to dawn, father dug up out of that great travelling chest of his a big bottle, and poured something out of it into a smaller bottle. We should have very much liked to ask what was in this bottle, but we daren't, for father looked so solemn about it that it quite frightened us.
But when he drew the lamp a little lower down from the ceiling and began to bustle about it and unscrew it, mother could contain herself no longer, and asked him what he was doing.
"I am pouring oil into the lamp."
"Well, but you're taking it to pieces! How will you ever get everything you have unscrewed into its proper place again?"
Neither mother nor we knew what to call the thing which father took out from the glass holder.
Father said nothing, but he bade us keep further off. Then he filled the glass holder nearly full from the smaller bottle, and we now guessed that there was oil in the larger bottle also.
"Well, won't you light it now?" asked mother again, when all the unscrewed things had been put back into their places and father hoisted the lamp up to the ceiling again.
"What! in the daytime?"
"Yes—surely we might try it, to see how it will burn."
"It'll burn right enough. Just wait till the evening, and don't bother.
After dinner, scullery-Pekka brought in a large frozen block of wood to split up into päreä, and cast it from his shoulders on to the floor with a thud which shook the whole room and set in motion the oil in the lamp.
"Steady!" cries father; "what are you making that row for?"
"I brought in this päre-block to melt it a bit—nothing else will do it—it is regularly frozen."
"You may save yourself the trouble then," said father, and he winked at us.
"Well, but you can't get a blaze out of it at all, otherwise."
"You may save yourself the trouble, I say."
"Are no more päreä to be split up, then?"
"Well, suppose I did say that no more päreä were to be split up?"
"Oh! 't is all the same to me if master can get on without 'em."
"Don't you see, Pekka, what is hanging down from the rafters there?" When father put this question he looked proudly up at the lamp, and then he looked pityingly down upon Pekka.
Pekka put his clod in the corner, and then, but not till then, looked up at the lamp.
"It's a lamp," says father, "and when it burns you don't want any more päre light."
"Oh!" said Pekka, and, without a single word more, he went off to his chopping-block behind the stable, and all day long, just as on other days, he chopped a branch of his own height into little fagots; but all the rest of us were scarce able to get on with anything. Mother made believe to spin, but her supply of flax had not diminished by one-half when she shoved aside the spindle and went out. Father chipped away at first at the handle of his axe, but the work must have been a little against the grain, for he left it half done. After mother went away, father went out also, but whether he went to town or not I don't know. At any rate he forbade us to go out too, and promised us a whipping if we so much as touched the lamp with the tips of our fingers. Why, we should as soon have thought of fingering the priest's gold-embroidered chasuble. We were only afraid that the cord which held up all this splendor might break and we should get the blame of it.
But time hung heavily in the sitting-room, and as we could n't hit upon anything else, we resolved to go in a body to the sleighing hill. The town had a right of way to the river for fetching water therefrom, and this road ended at the foot of a good hill down which the sleigh could run, and then up the other side along the ice rift.
"Here come the Lamphill children," cried the children of the town, as soon as they saw us.
We understood well enough what they meant, but for all that we did not ask what Lamphill children they alluded to, for our farm was, of course, never called Lamphill.
"Ah, ah! We know! You've gone and bought one of them lamps for your place. We know all about it!"
"But how came you to know about it already?"
"Your mother mentioned it to my mother when she went through our place. She said that your father had bought from the storeman one of that sort of lamps that burn so brightly that one can find a needle on the floor—so at least said the justice's maid."
"It is just like the lamp in the parsonage drawing-room, your father told us just now. I heard him say so with my own ears," said the innkeeper's lad.
"Then you really have got a lamp like that, eh?" inquired all the children of the town.
"Yes, we have; but it is nothing to look at in the daytime, but in the evening we'll all go there together."
And we went on sleighing down hill and up hill till dusk, and every time we drew our sleighs up to the hilltop, we talked about the lamp with the children of the town.
In this way the time passed quicker than we thought, and when we had sped down the hill for the last time, the whole lot of us sprang off homeward.
Pekka was standing at the chopping block and did n't even turn his head, although we all called to him with one voice to come and see how the lamp was lit. We children plunged headlong into the room in a body.
But at the door we stood stock-still. The lamp was already burning there beneath the rafters so brightly that we could n't look at it without blinking.
"Shut the door; it's rare cold," cried father, from behind the table.
"They scurry about like fowls in windy weather," grumbled mother from her place by the fireside.
"No wonder the children are dazed by it, when I, old woman as I am, cannot help looking up at it," said the innkeeper's old mother.
"Our maid also will never get over it," said the magistrate's step-daughter.
It was only when our eyes had got a little used to the light that we saw that the room was half full of neighbors.
"Come nearer, children, that you may see it properly," said father, in a much milder voice than just before.
"Knock that snow off your feet, and come hither to the stove; it looks quite splendid from here," said mother, in her turn.
Skipping and jumping, we went toward mother, and sat us all down in a row on the bench beside her. It was only when we were under her wing that we dared to examine the lamp more critically. We had never once thought that it would burn as it was burning now, but when we came to sift the matter out we arrived at the conclusion that, after all, it was burning just as it ought to burn. And when we had peeped at it a good bit longer, it seemed to us as if we had fancied all along that it would be exactly as it was.
But what we could not make out at all was how the fire was put into
