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Page 6
"But how about the bathroom and the stable?" said mother.
"In the bathroom we'll burn the lamp," said father.
That night I slept still less than the night before, and when I
woke in the morning I could almost have wept, if I hadn't been
ashamed, when I called to mind that the lamp was not to be lit
till the evening. I had dreamed that father had poured oil into
the lamp at night and that it had burned the whole day long.
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 parea, 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 pare-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 parea to be split up, then?"
"Well, suppose I DID say that no more parea 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 pare 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.
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