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Nevertheless, Pekka would have heard a thing or two from father if the lamp HAD gone to pieces, but fortunately no damage had been done. "Get up on the stove, you lout!" roared father at Pekka, and up on the stove Pekka crept. But father had already taken the lamp out of the chest, and now let it hang down from one hand. "Look! there it is now! How do you think it looks?
"I can't guess," said Pekka, and he came nearer to the lamp. "Perhaps it's the church chandelier, eh?" said father jokingly. "Perhaps," admitted Pekka; but he had become really curious, and passed his thumb along the lamp. "There's no need to finger it," says father; "look at it, but don't touch it." "All right, all right!
"Oh, indeed! Patching your shoes, eh? Then if you can't see to do that by the same light that does for me, you may take yourself off with your pare into the bath-house or behind it if you like." And Pekka went. He stuck his boots under his arm, took his stool in one hand and his pare in the other, and off he went. He crept softly through the door into the hall, and out of the hall into the yard.
"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."
A little while after that he began to patch up his boots, stretched on tiptoe to reach down a pare from the rafters, lit it, stuck it in a slit fagot, and sat him down on his little stool by the stove. We children saw this before father, who stood with his back to Pekka planing away at his axe-shaft under the lamp.
It was only after the townsfolk had gone that Pekka came in. He blinked a bit at first at the unusual lamplight, but then calmly proceeded to take off his jacket and rag boots. "What's that twinkling in the roof there enough to put your eyes out?" he asked at last, when he had hung his stockings up on the rafters. "Come now, guess what it is," said father, and he winked at mother and us.
But Pekka was so little enlightened by the whole explanation that he immediately began to split up the pare-wood log which he had dragged into the room the day before. Then father said to him that he had already told him there was no need to split parea any more. "Oh!
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 didn'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.
Pekka made a new fireplace in the bath-house out of the stones of the old stove, and the crickets flitted thither with the stones at least their chirping was never heard any more in the dwelling room.
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