Page:Stories and story-telling (1915).djvu/229

 hill, as it cocked its head on one side and looked down. And at the side of the goat kneeled a little girl.

"Is it yours, this goat?" she asked.

Oeyvind stared at her, with eyes and mouth wide open, and asked, "Who are you?"

"I am Marit, mother's little one, father's fiddle, grandfather's elf, four years old in the autumn, two days after the frost nights."

"Are you, though?" he said, as soon as he could get his breath.

"Is it yours, this goat?" she asked.

"Yes," he said.

"I should like it. You will not give it to me?"

"No, that I won't."

Marit lay down, kicking her legs and looking up at him, and then she said, "Not if I give you a butter cake for him?"

Oeyvind had eaten butter cake only once in his life, when his grandfather came to visit; anything like it he had never eaten before nor since. "Let me see the butter cake first," said he.

It didn't take Marit long to pull out a large cake. "Here it is," she said, and threw it down to him.

"Ow, it went to pieces," said the boy. He gathered up every crumb, and he couldn't help tasting a very small one. That was so good he had to eat another. Before he knew it he had eaten up the whole cake.

"Now the goat is mine," said the girl, and she