“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.

But time hung heavily in the sitting-room, and as we couldn’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.