“Who is there?” he asked, staring into the darkness. “Ah, it’s father!”
“Have you got bad eyes?” asked the old man derisively. “Will you have some eye-water?”
“Father’s eye-water—no thanks! But this damned light—one can’t see one’s hand before one’s face!”
“Open your mouth, then, and your teeth will shine!” Jeppe spat the words out. This lighting was always a source of strike between them.
“No one else in the whole island works by so wretched a light, you take my word, father.”
“In my time I never heard complaints about the light,” retorted Jeppe. “And better work has been done under the glass ball than any one can do now with all their artificial discoveries. But it’s disappearing now; the young people to-day know no greater pleasure than throwing their money out of the window after such modern trash.”
“Yes, in father’s time—then everything was so splendid!” said Master Andres. “That was when the angels ran about with white sticks in their mouths!”
In the course of the evening now one and another would drop in to hear and tell the news. And if the young master was in a good temper they would stay. He was the fire and soul of the party, as old Bjerregrav said; he could, thanks to his reading, give explanations of so many things.
When Pelle lifted his eyes from his work he was blind. Yonder, in the workshop, where Baker Jörgen and the rest sat and gossiped, he could see nothing but dancing specks of light, and his work swam round in the midst of them; and of his comrades he saw nothing but their aprons. But in the glass ball the light was like a living fire, in whose streams a world was laboring.
“Well, this evening there’s a capital light,” said Jeppe, if one of them looked to the lamp.