Animals -- Fiction; Children's stories, English; Short stories
But _I_ remember Tegumai Bopsulai, and Taffimai Metallumai and
Teshumai Tewindrow, her dear Mummy, and all the days gone by. And it was
so--just so--a little time ago--on the banks of the big Wagai!
ONE of the first things that Tegumai Bopsulai did
after Taffy and he had made the Alphabet was to
make a magic Alphabet-necklace of all the letters,
so that it could be put in the Temple of Tegumai
and kept for ever and ever. All the Tribe of
Tegumai brought their most precious beads and
beautiful things, and Taffy and Tegumai spent five
whole years getting the necklace in order. This is
a picture of the magic Alphabet-necklace. The
string was made of the finest and strongest
reindeer-sinew, bound round with thin copper wire.
Beginning at the top, the first bead is an old
silver one that belonged to the Head Priest of the
Tribe of Tegumai; then come three black
mussel-pearls; next is a clay bead (blue and
gray); next a nubbly gold bead sent as a present
by a tribe who got it from Africa (but it must
have been Indian really); the next is a long
flat-sided glass bead from Africa (the Tribe of
Tegumai took it in a fight); then come two clay
beads (white and green), with dots on one, and
dots and bands on the other; next are three rather
chipped amber beads; then three clay beads (red
and white), two with dots, and the big one in the
middle with a toothed pattern. Then the letters
begin, and between each letter is a little whitish
clay bead with the letter repeated small. Here are
the letters--
A is scratched on a tooth--an elk-tusk I think.
B is the Sacred Beaver of Tegumai on a bit of old glory.
C is a pearly oyster-shell--inside front.
D must be a sort of mussel-shell--outside front.
E is a twist of silver wire.
F is broken, but what remains of it is a bit of stag's horn.
G is painted black on a piece of wood. (The bead after G is a small
shell, and not a clay bead. I don't know why they did that.)
H is a kind of a big brown cowie-shell.
I is the inside part of a long shell ground down by hand. (It took
Tegumai three months to grind it down.)
J is a fish hook in mother-of-pearl.
L is the broken spear in silver. (K ought to follow J of course, but
the necklace was broken once and they mended it wrong.)
K is a thin slice of bone scratched and rubbed in black.
M is on a pale gray shell.
N is a piece of what is called porphyry with a nose scratched on it.
(Tegumai spent five months polishing this stone.)
O is a piece of oyster-shell with a hole in the middle.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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