Once, as a child, Mielikki Neith read a story about an old man who lived in the forest and was kind to all the animals, and when he eventually died the forest was silent and dark for a year, so that the people of the town believed it cursed, until the old fellow’s daughter, hearing of the darkness in her father’s favourite place, came home and chose to be married in a sunlit clearing in the heart of the wood and occupy his home with her new husband, and the whole forest rustled and awoke, and the birds and the flowers bloomed once more.
