Paradise Reclaimed Read Online Free PDF Page A

paraphernalia. But you allow Björn of Leirur to rob you of anything he likes, even your souls if you had such things and he happened to want them.”
    “I cannot say I had thought of letting old Björn ride very far on our Krapi,” said Steinar. “Not but what Björn has deserved nothing but good as far as I am concerned.”
    “The day may come, my friend, when you will part with this pony for less than nothing, and you will have cause to regret your refusal to sell him to me,” said the sheriff, and mounted.
    Steinar of Hlíðar once again laughed his squeaky titter as he stood on the paving. “I am well aware that it has never been thought proper for a poor man to own a fine horse,” he said. “And I realise that this is why you important people are now making so much fun of me, bless your hearts. One must just take it as it comes. But the fact of the matter is that it may not be so very long before this horse ceases to be more remarkable than any others; and perhaps that day has already arrived, even though I am reluctant to believe it.”
    Once again it was borne out that the more insistent the demands on Steinar of Hlíðar became, the more amiable became his falsetto giggles; but the Yes which was anyway the most alien of words to him always withdrew farther and farther until it disappeared entirely into that infinity where the word No belongs.
    But Steinar of Hlíðar liked to have his little joke just as much as the eminent did. There were more than a few smiles when word got around that he had refused to sell both to the sheriff and to Björn of Leirur a pony for riding to Þingvellir—but was now letting it be known that he intended to ride there himself after the hay-making in order to pay his respects to the king.
    It had long since been decided what gentry from the district were to ride west in the sheriff’s party, and it goes without saying that Steinar of Hlíðar was not one of them; but he seemed to have no misgivings about going on his own.
    It was undeniable that there was something about this horse which contrasted sharply with other horses and made them look inferior: something about his gait, his bearing, the look in his eyes and the quality of his responses which at the very least suggested that it was not quite right to say that the horse, as a species, had ceased to evolve ever since the unicorn’s horn was lost . . . that its development was not entirely finished even though there had evolved on it just about the most perfect form of foot ever known, one toe in a fixed shoe. This particular horse was at least in his own way rather like the Pope: not only above other horses, but above all his surroundings—meadows, waters, mountains, everything.
    There was no doubt at all that this was the horse that Steinar of Hlíðar was going to ride to see the king—or rather, as he put it to his neighbours with his usual modesty, “Our Krapi is going to Þingvellir to greet the king, with the fellow from Hlíðar on his back.” But there was no lack of wits in the district to turn the phrase round and say that the white horse from Hlíðar was going to ride on his master’s back to Þingvellir to see the king.
    Although Krapi was as gentle as a babe in the farmyard, and felt quite content when he was haltered in the home-field, he was a very different creature when it came to catching him out in the pastures. Near the farm he behaved like a model prisoner who deserved every privilege, even the privilege of being released at the earliest opportunity. But out in the open spaces he was his own master. If anyone tried to fetch him from the grazing down by the sands when he was with the other ponies, he would glide away from his pursuers like a breath of air; the more they tried to approach him, the farther he left them behind; and the faster they came at him the more he resembled the wind itself and went sweeping away over scree and mud, water and earth-slips, as if they were level plains; and when