Isak stopped; he realized that the more he talked the worse it would be.  He was on the point of changing his clothes, getting out of his best things he had put on to go down to the village in; but no, he altered his mind, he would stay as he was—­whatever he meant by that.  “You’d better say a word of it to Eleseus,” he says then.

And Inger answers:  “Best if you’d say it yourself.  He won’t do as I say.”

Very well, then, Isak is head of the house, so he should think; now see if Eleseus dares to murmur!  But, whether it were because he feared defeat, Isak draws back now, and says:  “Ay, ’tis true, I might say a word of it myself.  But by reason of having so many things to do, and busy with this and that, I’ve something else to think of.”

“Well ...?” said Inger in surprise.

And Isak goes off again—­not very far, only to the farther fields, but still, he goes off.  He is full of mysteries, and must hide himself out of the way.  The fact is this:  he had brought back a third piece of news from the village today, and that was something more than the rest, something enormous; and he had hidden it at the edge of the wood.  There it stands, wrapped up in sacking and paper; he uncovers it, and lo, a huge machine.  Look! red and blue, wonderful to see, with a heap of teeth and a heap of knives, with joints and arms and screws and wheels—­a mowing-machine.  No, Isak would not have gone down today for the new horse if it hadn’t been for that machine.

He stands with a marvellously keen expression, going over in his mind from beginning to end the instructions for use that the storekeeper had read out; he sets a spring here, and shifts a bolt there, then he oils every hole and every crevice, then he looks over the whole thing once more.  Isak had never known such an hour in his life.  To pick up a pen and write one’s mark on a paper, a document—­ay, ’twas a perilous great thing that, no doubt.  Likewise in the matter of a new harrow he had once brought up—­there were many curiously twisted parts in that to be considered.  Not to speak of the great circular saw that had to be set in its course to the nicety of a pencil line, never swaying east nor west, lest it should fly asunder.  But this—­this mowing-machine of his—­’twas a crawling nest of steel springs and hooks and apparatus, and hundreds of screws—­Inger’s sewing-machine was a bookmarker compared with this!

Isak harnessed himself to the shafts and tried the thing.  Here was the wonderful moment.  And that was why he kept out of sight and was his own horse.

For—­what if the machine had been wrongly put together and did not do its work, but went to pieces with a crash!  No such calamity happened, however; the machine could cut grass.  And so indeed it ought, after Isak had stood there, deep in study, for hours.  The sun had gone down.  Again he harnesses himself and tries it; ay, the thing cuts grass.  And so indeed it ought!