Piccaninnies | Page 6

wind as they swing. If you could only see the Lovely Ladies dancing! But very few have been lucky enough for that!
They dance on the wind, holding to the tips of the Hoheria and their white gowns flutter and swirl, and their ringlets float and sway, and sometimes in the joy of the dance a Lovely Lady lets go of her branch and comes fluttering down to earth.
Then she can dance no more, but lies very still. It is rather sad, because once she has let go she may not go back and dance on the tree for a whole long year, and it is looked on rather as a disgrace to be the first to fall.
However, she has not to wait long for company. For one by one, the Lovely Ladies, wild with the joy of the mazy dance, the soft rush of the wind and the laughing and clapping of the little leaves, loose their hold, and drift to earth light as thistle-down, and that is the end of their dancing for that year. Where do they go to while the year goes by? I have never found out, but I think it most likely that they go to the place they came from.
The Lovely Ladies have a song which they and the wind sing together as they dance, and the way it is sung makes everyone that hears it, mad to dance too. This is it:
"The wind is shaking the Hoheria tree, Cling, Maidens, cling!" "I'll dance with you if you'll dance with me, Swing, Maidens, swing!" "So up with a windy rush we go, Floating, fluttering, to and fro," "Sing for the joy of it, Maidens, Oh! Sing, Maidens, sing!"
The Piccaninnies simply love to watch the Lovely Ladies dancing, and long to be able to dance in the same way. When they hear the song, their little brown toes go fidgeting among the moss and leaves, and their heads nod-nodding to the air.
[Illustration: "They dance on the wind."]
[Illustration: "They began working themselves up and down like mad."]
Once they found a Hoheria tree after all the Lovely Ladies had left it, and now, they thought, was their chance. They swarmed all over the tree, clutched the tips of the delicate branches, and began working themselves up and down like mad.
It was great fun, but with their chubby little brown bodies, short legs, and shock heads, it did not look quite the same thing, and three Bush Babies riding that way on a good-natured kiwi, laughed so much (and even the kiwi, which is a grave bird, looked up and smiled) that the Piccaninnies, feeling rather foolish, dropped to the the ground and ran away and hid in the fern.

THE GREAT RED ENEMY.
One day one of those tiresome picnic parties came again to the bush, and after a great deal of stupid and rather terrifying noise, during which every Piccaninny and Bush Baby and all the other bush folk lay hidden away in utter silence, the people all went away again, and the Wee Folk were free to come out of their hiding places and turn over curiously the few things the party had left.
There was an empty meat tin which flashed so brightly that the Piccaninnies took it for a helmet, and each in turn tried to wear it; but it was so big that it simply hid them altogether, so very regretfully they had to throw it away. Then there were a few crusts of bread which quite by accident one of the boys discovered to be good to eat. They finished every crumb of the bread and enjoyed it, but on the whole agreed that fern root tasted nicer. There was an empty bottle that nobody dared go near, for they thought it was some kind of gun, and a baby's woollen bootee, which the Piccaninnies found most useful as an enormous bag to be filled with berries. But most mysterious, and therefore most interesting, though a little frightening, was a large heap of grey smoking ashes where the picnic fire had been.
The Piccaninnies circled round and round this queer grey pile wondering what on earth it could be. One boy venturing a little nearer than the others trod on a live cinder, for the fire was not as dead as it ought to have been, and jumped back howling and hopping round and round on one foot, holding the other.
When they crowded round him asking what had happened he cried in fear:
"The Red Enemy bit me. He lives under that grey mound, and I saw his red eye flash as I went near. That is his breath you see rising up through the trees."
The Piccaninnies looked frightened and backed away from the grey mound, but all the rest of that evening they came again