Moominland Midwinter by Tove Jansson Read Free Book Online

must be true then,' Moomintroll thought agitatedly. 'We are related. Because Mother's always told me that our forebears lived behind stoves...'
    At that moment the alarm clock went off. Moomintroll used to have it ring at dusk because that was the time when he longed most for company.
    The troll stiffened visibly, and then it whizzed inside the stove in a cloud of ashes. A moment later it started. rattling the damper in no very friendly way.
    Moomintroll shut off the alarm clock and listened with a thumping heart. But nothing else was to be heard.
    A few specks of soot came falling down the chimney, and the damper cord was swaying.
    Moomintroll went out on the roof to calm himself.
    'Well, how d'you like Grandfather!' Little My shouted from her sledge-slide.
    'An excellent person,' Moomintroll remarked with dignity. 'In an old family like ours people know how to behave,'
    Suddenly he felt very proud of having an ancestor. And it cheered him no little to think that Little My had no pedigree at all, but rather had come into the world by chance.
    *
    That night Moomintroll's ancestor rearranged the house, quietly enough, but with surprising strength.
    In the morning he had turned the sofa towards the porcelain stove and hung all the pictures anew. Those

    that he liked least he had hung upside-down. (Or perhaps they were those that he thought best of, who knows?)
    Not a single piece of furniture stood in its old place, and the alarm clock lay in the slop-pail. Indeed he had carried down a heap of old junk from the attic and piled it high around the stove.
    Too-ticky came over to look. 'I believe he's done that to feel more at home,' she said and rubbed her nose. 'He's tried to build himself a nice thicket around his house. So that he can be left alone.'
    'But what'll Mother say?' said Moomintroll.
    Too-ticky shrugged her shoulders. 'Well, why did you have to let him out?' she said. 'In any case this troll never eats anything. Very practical for him, and for you. You'll have to think the whole matter's fun, I suppose.'
    Moomintroll nodded.
    He thought for a while. Then he crawled inside the thicket of broken chairs, empty boxes, fishing nets, cardboard tubes, old baskets and gardening tools. Very soon he discovered that it was a cosy kind of place.
    He decided to sleep the night in a basket of wool that stood under a useless rocking-chair.
    As a matter of fact he had never felt really secure in the dim-lit drawing-room with its empty windows. And to look at the sleeping family made him melancholy.
    But here, in the small space between a packing case, the rocking-chair and the back of the sofa, he felt at ease and not at all lonely.
    He could see a little of the blackness inside the stove, but he was careful not to disturb his ancestor and built walls around his nest as quietly as he could.
    In the evening he took the lamp there with him and lay for a while listening to the ancestor's rustling in the chimney.
    'Perhaps I lived like this a thousand years ago,' Moomintroll thought happily.
    He half thought of shouting something up the chimney. Just a word of secret concord. But then he thought better of it, blew out his lamp and curled up deep in the wool.

CHAPTER 5
The new guests
    EACH day the sun rose a little higher in the sky. Finally it had reached high enough to throw a few cautious rays into the valley. That was a most important day. It was remarkable also because a stranger arrived in the valley shortly after noon.
    He was a thin little dog with a tattered woollen cap pulled deep over his ears. He said that his name was Sorry-oo, and that there was no food left in the valleys to the north. Since the Lady of the Cold had passed people had had next to nothing to eat. A desperate Hemulen was even rumoured to have bolted down his own beetle collection, but this was probably untrue. Possibly he had eaten some other Hemulen's collection, however. Anyway, lots of people were now on their way towards the Moomin valley.
    Somebody had