drine and I slept in a bed that was as hard as a stone,
and Andrine lay the whole night right across the bed and squeezed me
almost to death.

In the morning the air and everything was oh, so fresh! Our hair blew
all over our faces; we washed in the brook and the water was so cold
that our finger-nails ached.

After breakfast we started home again. We stood up in the wagon and
shouted hurrah as long as we could see Augusta in the saeter hut door,
and after that we sang all the way down the mountain.

But that story of the bear at the saeter Petter and Karsten had to hear
all summer long, for they were just as puffed up as ever.

Nothing impresses such conceited boys, you know.

CHAPTER XV

LOST IN THE FOREST

Oh, that awful, awful time! Even now I can wake in the middle of the
night, start up in bed and stare around frightened and trembling, for I
dream that I am in the dark forest alone, as I was that time at
Goodfields. Well, I wasn't absolutely alone, but I was the oldest, you
see, and so I had all the responsibility for both of us, and that is
almost worse than to be alone.

It was little brother Karl who was with me. We children were going to
have a blueberry party--that was the beginning of the whole thing. We
wanted to treat all the grown-up boarders, and Mother Goodfields, and
the maids too. They should all have blueberries with powdered sugar,
nothing else; anyway that was enough. But we should need a lot of
blueberries, oh, a frightful lot of them!

So we went off, each choosing his own clump of bushes, and picked and
picked; and then Karlie-boy and I got lost. Now, you shall hear.

It was in the morning, a very hot morning. The air in the valley had
been perfectly still all night. We had slept beside open windows with
only a sheet over us.

Immediately after breakfast I flew to the forest, for I knew a place
where I wanted to pick berries all by myself. Just as I was climbing
over the fence of the home hill-pasture, Karl saw me and called out, "I
want to go with you--it's mean of you--oh! oh! to run away from me--I
want to go too."

He made such a hullabaloo with his screaming that I had to stop and wait
for him. But one ought never in the world to humor screeching children,
for no good comes of it. How much better it would have been for Karl if
he had not been with me that long frightful day in the forest, and that
queer evening in crazy Helen's hut,--for that is where we finally found