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"Ah! that I can soon tell you," answered Thor. "I came with your favourite, the bay mare. I had to take your father down to Næs, and then he says to me, 'Thor,' says he, 'it isn't very far to town from here. Just take the bay mare and run down and see how the Lieutenant is, and if he is well and can come back with you, you must bring him back along with you,' says he."

When we left the town it was daylight. The roads were in splendid condition. The bay mare stretched out her old smart legs, and we arrived at length in sight of the dear old house. Thor jumped off the sledge to undo the gate, and as we merrily drove up to the door we were met by the boisterous welcome of old Rover, who, in his frantic joy at hearing my voice, almost broke his chains in trying to rush at me.

Such a Christmas as I spent that year I cannot recollect before or since.

The End.

Transcriber's Notes

Punctuation surrounding reported speech has been regularised, all other punctuation and spelling has been left as in the original text.

Some of the illustrations have been moved from their original placings to paragraph breaks. Every effort has been made to place them as close to the scenes depicted as possible.

Page numbers at the right side link to black and white images of the book's pages. The original book has blank pages following the full-page illustrations. To reduce the size of the image file, neither the blank pages nor the black and white copies of the full-page colour illustrations have been included.

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