asked the girl again.

"Ye-es," he said, and looked up.

"I have taken such a fancy to the goat. You will give it to me?"

"No, that I won't."

She lay kicking her legs, and looking down at him, and then she said,
"But if I give you a butter-cake for the goat, can I have him then?"

Oeyvind came of poor people, and had eaten butter-cake only once in his
life, that was when grandpapa came there, and anything like it he had
never eaten before nor since. He looked up at the girl. "Let me see the
butter-cake first," said he.

She was not long about it, took out a large cake, which she held in her
hand. "Here it is," she said, and threw it down.

"Ow, it went to pieces," said the boy. He gathered up every bit with the
utmost care; he could not help tasting the very smallest, and that was
so good, he had to taste another, and, before he knew it himself, he had
eaten up the whole cake.

"Now the goat is mine," said the girl. The boy stopped with the last bit
in his mouth, the girl lay and laughed, and the goat stood by her side,
with white breast and dark brown hair, looking down.

"Could you not wait a little while?" begged the boy; his heart began to
beat. Then the girl laughed still more, and got up quickly on her knees.

"No, the goat is mine," she said, and threw her arms around its neck,
loosened one of her garters, and fastened it around. Oeyvind looked up.
She got up, and began pulling at the goat; it would not follow, and
twisted its neck downward to where Oeyvind stood. "Bay-ay-ay," it said.
But she took hold of its hair with one hand, pulled the string with the
other, and said gently, "Come, goat, and you shall go into the room and
eat out of mother's dish and my apron." And then she sung,--

"Come, boy's goat,
Come, mother's calf,
Come, mewing cat
In snow-white shoes.
Come, yellow ducks,
Come out of your hiding-place;
Come, little chickens,
Who can hardly go;
Come, my doves
With soft feathers,
See, the grass is wet,
But the sun does you good;
And early, early is it in summer,
But call for the autumn, and it will come."

There stood the boy.

He had taken care of the goat since the winter before, when it was born,
and he had never imagined he could lose it; but now it was done in a
moment, and he would never see it again.

His mother came up humming from the beach, with wooden pans which she
had scoured: she sa