ildren.

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 to
eat in New Zealand, one takes a piece of something from the basket in
which food is served, bites out a mouthful and hands it to the next, who
does the same, and passes it to his neighbor, and so on until it is all
gone, and some other morsel is begun upon.

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, who had e