Piccaninnies

I.

CHRISTMAS TREE. (_Pohutukawa_).

Long ago the Piccaninnies didn't have a rag to their
backs except a huia feather which they wore in their hair. They were the
jolliest, tubbiest, brownest babies you ever saw with tiny nubbly knobs
on their shoulders, as if they had started to grow wings and then
changed their minds about it, and little furry pointed ears, as all wild
creatures have. Only these were _not_ wild, but very, very shy.

Where did they live? Oh, just anywhere--all about; among the fern, in
the long grass, down on the sands, in all the places babies love to roll
about in.

And then _People_ began to come about, so tiresome! They began to make
houses, sell things in shops, tear about in big boxes on wheels, and
send great, clattering, shrieking, puffing monsters rushing through the
country, dropping smoke and cinders like anything. There was such a
clatter and a chatter, such gabbling and babbling, such hammering and
banging and laughing and crying, and hurry and scurry and rush that it
was enough to drive one crazy. There was such a _fuss_, the Piccaninnies
simply couldn't stand it, and they fled to the Bush. Well, wouldn't you,
with all that going on?

And there they lived a long time. What fun they had swinging on the
giant fern leaves, climbing the trees, chasing the fantails, riding the
kiwis, who are very good-natured, though shy, and teasing the great,
sleepy round-eyed morepork, who is so stupid and _owlish_ in the
daytime.

And then People came _into the Bush!_ Did you ever!

The Piccaninnies took to the trees altogether then, and no wonder!

II.

And then one day some one in a picnic party left a scrap of paper
blowing about--you know the horrid way picnic parties have!--and a
Piccaninny found it.

[Illustration: "To be sure they were looking at the pictures upside
down, but that made no real difference."]

As luck would have it, it was a girl Piccaninny; had it been a boy he
would simply have torn it up and made paper darts with it to throw at
the other boys, and no harm would have been done. _But girls are
different!_

[Illustration: "Teasing the great, sleepy, round-eyed morepork."]

She smoothed it out and looked at it carefully, and then she called the
other girls to look at it. And soon there was such a clattering and
chattering that the boys came racing that way to see if the girls had
found anything good to eat. You know boys!

The scrap