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."