st think of all I lived through in that one day! And still I haven't
told half how strange and uncanny it all was,--the long, long day in the
forest and Crazy Helen dancing under the stars.

When I got to Goodfields, I ate three eggs and eight slices of bread and
butter, and drank four cups of chocolate. I truly did.

CHAPTER XVI

TRAVELLING WITH A BILLY-GOAT

Would you believe it? Karsten got a live billy-goat as a present from
Mother Goodfields, and I got a live wild forest-cat from Jens Kverum's
mother. Of course I wanted something alive since Karsten had the goat,
so I begged and teased Agnete Kverum until she finally said I might have
the yellow-brown cat I wanted. Not that I would not rather have had the
goat, you may be sure, though naturally I wouldn't let Karsten know
that. He was puffed up enough over it, as it was.

Well, anyway, we took both the goat and the cat with us when we went
home; but anything so difficult to travel with you can't possibly
imagine. Now you shall hear the whole story from first to last; for if
anybody else has a desire to take a real live goat or cat with them on
the train or into the ladies' cabin of the steamboat, they had better
know all the bother and row-de-dow it will make. I advise every one
against doing it. All the people who are traveling with you get angry,
although it is scarcely to be expected that a billy-goat or a wild cat
will behave nicely in a ladies' cabin. At any rate, ours didn't. Listen
now.

Mother Goodfields had any number of goats. They were all up at the
saeter except two, and these roamed in the forest with the cows, because
each of them had an injured leg. But one day one goat was missing and
nobody in the world could find it.

Old Kari mourned for it constantly and talked of nothing else. Every day
she pictured to herself a new horrible way it had met its death. Either
it had got caught in a mountain crevice and starved to death, or a wolf
had taken it, or Beata Oppistuen had butchered it without any right to.
"That Beata! You could expect any kind of doings from her." Old Kari
went to and fro in the forest seeking the goat till far into the night.

But one fine day there on the forest side of the farm fence stood the
lost goat with a tiny little baby-goat at her side. And that kid was the
prettiest and cunningest you ever set eyes on. It had a soft silky
little beard, and it stood on its hind legs and hopped and skipped as if
it would jum