Animals -- Fiction; Children's stories, English; Short stories
P and Q are missing. They were lost, a long time ago, in a great
war, and the tribe mended the necklace with the dried rattles of
a rattlesnake, but no one ever found P and Q. That is how the
saying began, 'You must mind your P's. and Q's.'
R is, of course, just a shark's tooth.
S is a little silver snake.
T is the end of a small bone, polished brown and shiny.
U is another piece of oyster-shell.
W is a twisty piece of mother-of-pearl that they found inside a big
mother-of-pearl shell, and sawed off with a wire dipped in sand
and water. It took Taffy a month and a half to polish it and drill
the holes.
X is silver wire joined in the middle with a raw garnet. (Taffy
found the garnet.)
Y is the carp's tail in ivory.
Z is a bell-shaped piece of agate marked with Z-shaped stripes. They
made the Z-snake out of one of the stripes by picking out the soft
stone and rubbing in red sand and bee's-wax. Just in the mouth of
the bell you see the clay bead repeating the Z-letter.
These are all the letters.
The next bead is a small round greeny lump of
copper ore; the next is a lump of rough turquoise;
the next is a rough gold nugget (what they call
water-gold); the next is a melon-shaped clay bead
(white with green spots). Then come four flat ivory
pieces, with dots on them rather like dominoes;
then come three stone beads, very badly worn; then
two soft iron beads with rust-holes at the edges
(they must have been magic, because they look very
common); and last is a very very old African bead,
like glass--blue, red, white, black, and yellow.
Then comes the loop to slip over the big silver
button at the other end, and that is all.
I have copied the necklace very carefully. It
weighs one pound seven and a half ounces. The black
squiggle behind is only put in to make the beads
and things look better.
[Illustration]
OF all the Tribe of Tegumai
Who cut that figure, none remain,--
On Merrow Down the cuckoos cry--
The silence and the sun remain.
But as the faithful years return
And hearts unwounded sing again,
Comes Taffy dancing through the fern
To lead the Surrey spring again.
Her brows are bound with bracken-fronds,
And golden elf-locks fly above;
Her eyes are bright as diamonds
And bluer than the skies above.
In mocassins and deer-skin cloak,
Unfearing, free and fair she flits,
And lights her little damp-wood smoke
To show her Daddy where she flits.
For far--oh, very far behind,
So far she cannot call to him,
Comes Tegumai alone to find
The daughter that was all to him.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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