Energy is apparent in the following passage:—
"Is it yours, this goat?" asked the girl again.
"Yes," he said, and looked up.
"I have taken such a fancy to the goat. You will not 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?"
The justness of expression, the sincerity, is especially impressive when Oeyvind's Mother came out and sat down by his side when the goat no longer satisfied him and he wanted to hear stories of what was far away. There is emotional harmony too, because the words suggest the free freshness of the mountain air and the landscape which rose round about the Boy and his Mother.
So she told him how once everything could talk: "The mountain talked to the stream, and the stream to the river, the river to the sea, and the sea to the sky."—But then he asked if the sky did not talk to any one: "And the sky talked to the clouds, the clouds to the trees, the trees to the grass, the grass to the flies, the flies to the animals, the animals to the children, the children to the grown-up people. . . ." Oeyvind looked at the mountain, the trees, and the sky and had never seen them before.
There is delicacy or emotional harmony also in the Mother's song. When Oeyvind asked, "What does the Cat say?" his Mother sang:—
At evening softly shines the sun,
The cat lies lazy on the stone.
Two small mice,
Cream, thick and nice,
Four bits of fish,
I stole behind a dish,
And am so lazy and tired,
Because so well I have fared.
The unity is maintained through the central interest of the two Children and the goat.
The tale is characterized by fairly good mass. As the
