And Little Redcap did so until the great trough was quite full. When the smell of the sausages reached the nose of the wolf he snuffed it up and looked around, and stretched out his neck so far that he lost his balance and began to slip, and he slipped down off the roof straight in the great trough and was drowned. Then Little Redcap went cheerfully home and came to no harm.
FOOTNOTES:
[3] Every boy and girl should read this pretty fairy story.
New Zealand Children.
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.