New Zealand children

[The Little Prince]

■New Zealand children

New Zealand children are pretty, dark-eyed, smooth-cheeked little creatures, with clear skins of burnt umber color, and the reddest mouths in the world, until the girl grows up and her mother tattooes her lips blue, for gentility's sake.

All day they live in the open air, unless during a violent storm. But they are perfectly healthy and very clean, for the first thing they do is to plunge into the sea water. Besides this, they take baths in warm springs that abound everywhere, and which keep their skins in good order. As to their breakfast, I am afraid that often they have some very unpleasant things to eat—stale shark, for instance, and sour corn bread—so sour that you could not swallow it, and boiled fern root, or the pulp of fern stems, or crawfish.

Even if their father had happened to cut down a tall palm the day before, in order to take what white people call the "palm cabbage" out of it's very top, I'm afraid he would not share this dainty with the children. I am not sure he would offer even their mother a bite. It would be literally a bite if he did, for when people get together

Sixty or seventy years ago New Zealanders had never seen a pig or any animal larger than a cat. But about that time, one Captain King, feeling that a nation without pork and beans and succotash could never come to any good, brought them some Indian corn and some beans, and taught them how to plant and cultivate them, and shortly sent them some fine pigs, not doubting but that they would understand what to do with them without instruction.

However, the New Zealanders had no idea what the pigs were sent for, and everybody asked everybody else about it, until one—the smart fellow who knows it all—said that he had heard all about them from a sailor, and that they were horses! Oh, certainly they were horses! The sailor had described them perfectly—long heads, pointed ears, broad backs, four legs, and a tail. They were to ride upon. Great chiefs always rode them where the sailors lived.

So the New Zealand chiefs mounted the pigs, and when Captain King came to see how everything was going on, they had ridden them to death—all but a few obstinate ones,

Captain King did not despair, however. He took two natives home with him, taught them all about the cultivation of maize, and the rearing of pigs; and pork is now as popular in New Zealand as it is in Cincinnati. You can hardly take a walk without meeting a mother-pig and a lot of squealing piglets; and people pet them more than they ever did or ever will in their native lands. Here, you know, when baby wants something to play with, some one finds him a kitten, a ball of white floss, or a little Maltese, or a black morsel with green eyes and a red mouth; but in New Zealand they give him a very, very young pig, smooth as a kid glove, with little slits of eyes, and his curly tail twisted up into a little tight knot; and the brown baby hauls it about and pulls its ears and goes to sleep hugging it fast; and there they lie together, the piglet grunting comfortably, the baby snoring softly, for hours at a time.

It is pleasanter to think of a piggy as a pet than as pork, and pleasanter still to know that the little New Zealanders have something really nice to eat—the finest sweet potatoes that grow anywhere.

They say that sweet potatoes, which they call kumere, is the food good spirits eat, and they sing a song about them, and so do the mothers, which is very pretty. The song tells how, long ago, Ezi-Ki and his wife, Ko Paui, sailing on the water in a boat, were wrecked, and would have been drowned but for good New Zealanders, who rescued them. And Ko Paui saw that the children had very little that was wholesome for them to eat, and showed her gratitude by returning, all by herself, to Tawai, to bring them seeds of the kumere. And how storms arose and she was in danger, but at last arrived in New Zealand safely and taught them how to plant and raise this excellent food. And every verse of the song ends with: "Praise the memory of beautiful Ko Paui, wife of Ezi-Ki, forever."

Little New Zealanders run about with very little on, as a general thing, but they all have cloaks—they call them "mats." Their mother sits on the ground with a little weaving frame about two feet high before her, and makes them of what is called New Zealand flax. The long threads hang down in rows of fringes, one over the other, and shine like silk. They have also water-proofs, or "rain-mats," made of long polished leaves that shed the water. When a little New Zealand girl pulls this over her head she does not mind any shower. You may see a circle of these funny objects sitting in the

New Zealand children have, strange to say, many toys. They swim like ducks, and, as I have said, revel in the natural hot baths, where they will sit and talk by the hour. In fact, the life of a New Zealand child is full of occupation, and both girls and boys are bright, light-hearted, and intelligent.

/ from The Project Gutenberg EBook of Holiday Stories for Young People, by Various