“Are you mad?  How can it be lighted when there’s no oil in it?”

“Well, but can’t you pour some in, then?”

“Pour in oil?  A likely tale!  Yes, that’s just the way when people don’t understand these things; but the storekeeper warned me again and again never to pour the oil in by firelight, as it might catch fire and burn the whole house down.”

“Then when will you pour the oil into it!”

“In the daytime—­daytime, d’ye hear?  Can’t you wait till day?  It isn’t such a great marvel as all that.”  “Have you seen it burn, then?”

“Of course I have.  What a question!  I’ve seen it burn many a time, both at the parsonage and when we tried this one here at the storekeeper’s.”

“And it burned, did it?”

“Burned?  Of course it did, and when we put up the shutters of the shop, you could have seen a needle on the floor.  Look here, now!  Here’s a sort of capsule, and when the fire is burning in this fixed glass here, the light cannot creep up to the top, where it isn’t wanted either, but spreads out downward, so that you could find a needle an the floor.”

Now we should have all very much liked to try if we could find a needle on the floor, but father rang up the lamp to the roof and began to eat his supper.

“This evening we must be content, once more, with a pare,” said father, as he ate; “but to-morrow the lamp shall burn in this very house.”

“Look, father!  Pekka has been splitting parea all day, and filled the outhouse with them.”

“That’s all right.  We’ve fuel now, at any rate, to last us all the winter, for we sha’n’t want them for anything else.”

“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.