Animals -- Fiction; Children's stories, English; Short stories
‘Now, we’ve got it,’ said Tegumai, standing on one leg. ‘I’ll draw ‘em
all in a string like fish.’
‘Hadn’t we better put a little bit of stick or something between each
word, so’s they won’t rub up against each other and jostle, same as if
they were carps?’
‘Oh, I’ll leave a space for that,’ said her Daddy. And very incitedly he
drew them all without stopping, on a big new bit of birch-bark. (19.)
‘Shu-ya-las ya-maru,’ said Taffy, reading it out sound by sound.
‘That’s enough for to-day,’ said Tegumai. ‘Besides, you’re getting
tired, Taffy. Never mind, dear. We’ll finish it all to-morrow, and then
we’ll be remembered for years and years after the biggest trees you can
see are all chopped up for firewood.’
So they went home, and all that evening Tegumai sat on one side of the
fire and Taffy on the other, drawing ya’s and yo’s and shu’s and shi’s
in the smoke on the wall and giggling together till her Mummy said,
‘Really, Tegumai, you’re worse than my Taffy.’
‘Please don’t mind,’ said Taffy. ‘It’s only our secret-s’prise, Mummy
dear, and we’ll tell you all about it the very minute it’s done; but
please don’t ask me what it is now, or else I’ll have to tell.’
So her Mummy most carefully didn’t; and bright and early next morning
Tegumai went down to the river to think about new sound pictures,
and when Taffy got up she saw Ya-las (water is ending or running out)
chalked on the side of the big stone water-tank, outside the Cave.
‘Um,’ said Taffy. ‘These picture-sounds are rather a bother! Daddy’s
just as good as come here himself and told me to get more water for
Mummy to cook with.’ She went to the spring at the back of the house and
filled the tank from a bark bucket, and then she ran down to the river
and pulled her Daddy’s left ear--the one that belonged to her to pull
when she was good.
‘Now come along and we’ll draw all the left-over sound-pictures,’ said
her Daddy, and they had a most inciting day of it, and a beautiful lunch
in the middle, and two games of romps. When they came to T, Taffy said
that as her name, and her Daddy’s, and her Mummy’s all began with that
sound, they should draw a sort of family group of themselves holding
hands. That was all very well to draw once or twice; but when it came to
drawing it six or seven times, Taffy and Tegumai drew it scratchier and
scratchier, till at last the T-sound was only a thin long Tegumai with
his arms out to hold Taffy and Teshumai. You can see from these three
pictures partly how it happened. (20, 21, 22.)
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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