Piccaninnies | Page 5

bough had ceased to
sway gently up and down. At first he was very surprised, and then,
poking his little brown head out, he was horribly frightened. Instead of
the green leafy arch above him, he saw a flat white thing, and all
around him were enormous strange objects. Craning out still farther he
over-balanced himself and fell thud! upon a hard, polished flat plain.
He tried to scramble to his feet, but the ground under him was so
slippery that he could only crawl gingerly on all fours and flounder
about on it.
Someone exclaimed suddenly:
"Oh, look at that horrid brown insect. It must have come from the tea
tree. Fetch the brush and dustpan."
And someone else cried excitedly:
"Kill it! Kill it!"
But a third someone said quite calmly:
"Nonsense! It's quite harmless!"
Then a huge bristly thing fell upon him, and smothered and gasping he
felt himself swept along, and then flying through the air. Again he fell
with a thud upon something hard, but it was only the hardness of the
good brown earth, and the tall green grass closed protectingly over him.

You may be sure he lost no time in scuttling back to the bush, and he
didn't hunt tuis again for many a long day.
[Illustration]

~Bush Babies~

KOWHAI BLOSSOM.
The Bush Babies lie In cradles of gold; They haven't a stitch, But they
never take cold; For the golden flowers, And the golden sun, And the
golden smiles Upon everyone-- Keep the world warm and bright And
flooded with light For the Bush Babies In their cradles of gold.
The Bush Babies come out of the kowhai flowers. They are the prettiest
little things--fair as lilies with golden ringlets, and little golden peaked
caps, bent over like a horn upon their heads. I don't think they wear
anything else much, just an odd little fluff of green here and there, like
stray feathers that have stuck to them.
[Illustration: "They haven't a stitch, But they never take cold."]
The Piccaninnies love to play with them; indeed, they're favourites with
everyone, and it's the prettiest sight in the world at early morning, to
see each Bush Baby crawling out of its cradle flower on its little tummy,
yawning or smiling or stretching, or blinking at the light with round
sleepy eyes.
But you would never get up early enough to see that.
They tell a story in the Bush about a Bush Baby and a Piccaninny--and
laugh about it to this day. The Piccaninny told the Bush Baby that he
would find some honey for her. Now the Bush Babies love honey better
than anything else in the world, so she put her hand in his sweetly and
off they set.

They came to the edge of the swamp where the tall branching flax
flowers grow (the flax is not in flower when the kowhai is, but I can't
spoil my story for that), and every flax flower was alive with birds,
dipping, and sipping the honey, so the two little creatures wandered off
again.
The Piccaninny led the Bush Baby to several other flowers, but at every
one some bird or insect would edge them away, crying out:
"We got here first!"
[Illustration: "The Bush Lawyer, the most spiteful plant in the bush."]
At last the Bush Baby began to cry. They are very young and tender
things, these Babies, and this one had been caught and scratched by the
Bush Lawyer, the most spiteful plant in the Bush, and had nearly fallen
into a creek, and the peak of its cap was dangling into its eye, and it
was a long way from home.
To comfort it the Piccaninny put his little brown arms right round it and
loved it, and they both sat down on a fallen tree to rest while he wiped
its eyes with a soft green leaf--they didn't know about pocket
handkerchiefs yet.
Oh! The next moment out of a hole in the tree flew a swarm of angry
bees, with humming wings and large fierce eyes and tails curved down
to strike.
The Bush Baby was so astonished that she fell off the log, and there she
lay face down on the green moss, so still that the bees took her for a
fallen kowhai blossom and droned away from her.
But the Piccaninny ran for his life, with all the bees after him, and
when the noise of their angry buzzing had died away, the Bush Baby
got up and had a rare feast of honey, and went back home very sticky
and blissful and contented.
As for the Piccaninny, who had escaped the bees, by lying down and

pretending to be a Tea Tree Jack (they call that camouflage now), he
only sniffed