Paradise Reclaimed Read Free Page B

business, and then there was much boisterous talk and uproarious laughter with the farmers and farm-folk; there was seldom much brennivín* on the go on those occasions, but usually the snuff was moistened with cognac.
    Steinar of Hlíðar was pottering about with his dykes, keeping himself busy until the grass should be ready for mowing, adjusting a stone here and a stone there as he felt the eye demanded. He walked over to meet the visitors, as a good farmer should, and greeted the sheriff respectfully; Björn of Leirur, on the other hand, he greeted according to country custom with a kiss.
    “What a hell of a man you are!” said Björn of Leirur, patting him affectionately. “Always adjusting the stones. Always making improvements. Always having fun.”
    The sheriff’s glance was roving along the egg-smooth edges of the stone-work, and he too could not restrain his admiration: “What wonders you could work with stone if you lived in Rome, man, like old Thorvaldsen!”*
    “Oh, it would be an ingratitude to God if I grudged the trouble of finding the right stone for the right niche,” said Steinar. “It just takes a little doing, bless your heart; perhaps there is only the one space in the whole wall where this stone rightly fits. But certainly I have never envied those who can perhaps amuse themselves better than I can. The finest parts of these walls are not my work at all, however; they were done by my great-grandfather, God rest his soul, who rebuilt the whole farm in the last century after the big volcanic eruptions that destroyed every wall in the place. We nineteenth-century folk have neither the eye nor the knack to make walls the way they used to in the past; and besides, time has worked to their advantage by letting the stones bed down the more snugly, with God’s help—and with maybe an occasional helping hand from later generations. Until the next volcanic eruptions, of course.”
    “I have heard that you never say Yes or No, Steinar,” said the sheriff. “I would like to find out if that is true, some time.”
    Steinar’s laugh was a high-pitched titter. “Bless you, I cannot say I have ever really noticed, my dear fellow,” he replied; as was the custom of all good farmers in Steinahlíðar, he always talked to people of importance as he would to a brother or rather, perhaps, to a pauper of whom one is fond not so much for his worth as because one detects in him a divine personality. “It probably does not make all that much difference in this world whether one says Yes or No, heeheehee; and now come this way, boys, step inside and have a cup of something to drink.”
    “Tell me something about that white colt of yours we were admiring out there,” said Björn of Leirur. “A fine beast; what’s his pedigree?”
    “It would really be better to ask the children,” replied Steinar. “They think he came straight from the creek. Sometimes I think that children, bless them, get much more out of life than we adults do. To tell you the truth, the horse is more or less theirs.”
    The sheriff had not dismounted, but Björn of Leirur was walking at Steinar’s side, leading his pony, as they went up to the farmhouse. The children had come out on to the paved doorstep. Björn of Leirur kissed them and gave them each a silver coin, as was the custom of decent people.
    “Aha! That’s a girl I want for a wife when she grows up,” he said, “and that’s a lad I want for a foreman. But what I was going to say, my dear Steinar, was—what a hell of a man you are to have such a handsome colt! What on earth are you going to do with a horse like that? Aren’t you going to sell him to me?”
    “Oh, it’s a bit early for that while the children still call him a kelpie. I think we should wait until he is just an ordinary horse, the way most other horses are in the end, and the children no longer small.”
    “Quite right,” said the sheriff. “Never sell your children’s fairy-tales. Björn has quite