THW WIGWAM

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 575, 30 January 1929, Page 8

THW WIGWAM

Here we gather, here we meet in pow-woio friendly and discreet. To talk of earth, and sea, and sky, and watch the world of men go by.

UNDER THE HOLIDAY MOON REDFEATHEK lias been following a far trail, golden with the light of the holiday moon and sweet with the sound of peaceful water lapping the shore of little beaches. Great trees towered above, and below, the green moss and fragile ferns spread out like tiny meadows. The Great Out-doors was full of whisperings. Pine-needles rustled down, birds fluttered in every sheltering bough, little ground creatures scurried oil into denser cover and occasionally a morepork would send his plaintive eall out of the shadows. Then the dawn on grey-sandalled feet, the sun spilling his bounty over the rose and gold horizon, blue noons and windless eves. And always, like a monotone, the hushed sound of the sea. It is good to lay down one’s quill once in a while, Chiefs and Braves, aud venture forth under the holiday moon in quest of all that the green earth has to offez\ It is then that we store up riches to bring back into our world of every day. See, I have a casket of green moss from a miniature meadow, rare shells that have sailed a halcyon sea, a feather from a sea-bird’s breast, a flower that once grew on a windy height. At a touch they vanish, but a moment’s reflection can bring them back. Now, once again your Chief turns back the flap of the Wigwam and ealls you to pow-pow. EEDFEATHER.

GIRL GUIDES* CORNER Sun-flecked Shadow, of St. John’s Company, Royal Oak, writes that the Brownies will reassemble on Tuesday, February 5, and the Guides the following day. • • • Wave Crest, of the North Shore Company. writes: “We had lovely weather for our camp at Clevedon. We went for three long hikes, a swim every day in a nearby river. and even had a fancy dress dance. Our camp lasted for twelve days, and we were all very sorry when it was time to go home..” FOR WISE HEADS Word square: 1. To mend. 2. To adore. 3. A tippler. 4. Religious belief. 3. A crowd of animals. Answer to last week's word puzzle: Bounce, ounce, once, one, on. NOT THE SAME Little Boy. returning from swim: papa, is a good swimmer.” ~her: "Why, sonny, your papa canswim a stroke." Little Boy: “Well. i‘*> 'an stay under wsier for time.” ■

PRAYER The bell-bird is silent down in the valley. The black tui's whistle is mournful and slow; Crooning and crying and sobbing the waters Over the rocks and the boulders below. Sad little wind from the bush-covered mountain. Blowing the rata’s red petals a-down, Age-old koninis bend low in their sorThe fair mountain lily is faded and brown. High 911 the mountain with wings all bedraggled, Staiining the snow with a terrible red. So strange and so silent, the little brown kea, With quivering feathers lies helpless and dead. Silent the bell-bird, down in the valley. Crooning and sobbing, the dark waters go; Hushed is the wind in the fast drooping branches . . . The whole of the bushland is praying below. —Harvest Moon (Alma Chamberlain).

WIGWAMS OF LONG AGO Beside a little stream, which has been given the unromantic name of Muddy River, lie the ancient ruins of the ‘‘Lost City.” To the west lies Nevada’s Petrified Forest and the fantastic red sandstone formations about the weird Valley of Fire. To the east looms the flat-topped bulk of Mormon Mesa, a maze of eroded foothills at-its base. Almost continuously, for five miles along that Muddy River, stretch ruins that tell a tale of the dim centuries; that two thousand years ago the valley was teeming with life; was the green-fielded, fertile home of Indians of the Pueblo type. Working with the utmost care, so as not to damage any relics that might lie beneath the rubbish, excavators have laid bare curious little buildings, circular in form, or rather, the foundations of such buildings, sort of dugouts, the floors some distance below the ground-level. Upright slabs had been set around the sides to keep the earth from sliding in and the walls, of which only small portions were left, had been made of stones and adobe clay. While clearing the foundations of the rubbish of fallen walls and desert sand, many pieces of broken pottery, now fitted together and restored, have been found. In a little bowl-shaped fireplace near the-middle of one dwelling lay the ashes of the last fire that had warmed the humble dwelling, and later the seekers discovered the skeleton of a woman buried beneath the floor and with her the Last gifts of her sorrowing family—a pretty painted pottery bowl and two cooking pots of clay, all in perfect condition. Some of these stone and clay-walled dwelling places were a collection of many tiny rooms, built around a courtyard. but unlike other ancient tribal houses, were all of one storey. So, the secret, so jealously guarded by the shifting desert sands has been wrested from them at last by those who seek for knowledge, and the story of a forgotten people is retrieved for all to read. —Sighing Wind (Phyllis Fitzgerald). A bronze statue of Neptune, believed to be of the sth century 8.C., has been recovered from the sea near Euboea (Aegean Sea) and placed in the Athena museum.

A FAMOUS TREE Rather more than a century ago Napoleon planted a weeping willow on St. Helena, where he been sene as a prisoner after the Battle of Waterloo. When he died, in 1821, he was buried beneath his willow. A quarter of ,a. century later Mr. John Tinline, pne of the early Hew Zealand pioneers, sailed from England on a ship which called at St. Helena for water. He took several cuttings from Napoleon’s tree. Placing the ends of the cuttings in potatoes to keep them moist, he carried them to New Zealand and planted them at Nelson, where they grew abundantly and furnished innumerable cuttings for other parts of New Zealand, as well as for the banks of the Yarra River at Melbourne. Other cuttings later became trees in England, two of them being planted in the garden of Westminster Abbey, and a third in the garden of Kensington Square.

THE RING OF STRAW In the 6tli century, about 1,400 years ago, a wandering bard came upon a deserted British house. On the four side's of his square staff were cut notes of the hundreds of historic songs which he could sing. He peeped into the large living room of the house, and saw the ring of straw still surrounding the central hearth, with skins spread here and there on which the chief and his family had slept. Being tired, he sought rest on the family straw, and had a curious dream. H© dreamt of a great house infested with mice. The householder bought at large cost a huge cat to drive them away. This the “cat” did, but it so happened that the animal grew up into a tiger, and soon drove the householder and his family out of doors. When the poet awoke, he thought how like the dream was to the story of the Britons, who, not long ago, had inhabited this very house. The Romans had left them and they were unable to resist the invasions of their enemies, the Piets and the Scots. So they hired Saxons, Jutes and others from abroad to fight their battles. And these indeed drove out the enemy, but, turning afterwards on their British masters, forced many chiefs to fly for safety to the Welsh Hills and Cornwall.

CHALK The child sees his teacher with a bit of chalk in his hand. What is that chalk to the child, or to the teacher himself? Merely a substance for making white lines on a blackboard. But that bit of chalk is an ancient cemetery, in which lie buried creatures that lived and played their part in the system of things millenniums ago! In the yet warm seas of the slowly cooling planet floated myriads of infusoria, with power to secrete from the sea a sheltering film of lime. As these tiny myriads died the facing of lime they wore sank to the bottom. In process of ages this grew to a white slime; some convulsion lifted up the sea bed, and the white slime became a chalk cliff; And the.bit of chalk in the teacher’s fingers represents the whole process. What ages, what revolutions, that little bit of white earth hides in its atomsl It is a perished eternity which the teacher holds in his fingers.

THE COMMON ENEMY The following strange story is told of-a cat, a chicken, and a dove. A cat seized a pet dove in a farmyard, but before it could kill it a chicken rushed to the rescue, and pecked the cat so furiously that it released the dove, which escaped with the loss of a few feathers. It would bo interesting to know whether the dove and tlie chicken were sufficiently familiar with each other to be regarded as friends, or whether the rescue was due to the general instinct of the fowl , tribe to defend feathered folk against their common enemy, the cat. A PRINCELY UNCLE Boys and girls who recite Macaulay’s splendid verse* will like their poet the better for knowing that he was a prince of uncles, who, when his nephew was a boy at Harrow, used to send him letters sealed with a great blob of wax, in which he had buried a sovereign for the lad. Macaulay little dreamed at the time that the merryhearted schoolboy of that day would come to write his biography, one of the best in our language. Macaulay’s nephew, Sir George Trevelyan, recently died at the age of SO.

THE TAHITIAN NIGHT Gleaming like golden nuggets against a cloth of black velvet, the great yellow stars of the South Seas have burst forth close upon the fading of the short tropical twilight. They find a million reflections in the still water of the lagoon, unruffled now even by a zephyr. The dark shapes of the schooners at their moorings loom shadowy and elusive.. Snatches of song float from deck to deck across the harbour, re-echoed from the quayside. An outrigger canoe paddles somewhere out there, and its occupants are chanting in soft Tahitian to the accompaniment of ukuleles and guitars. Far out on the reef the great torches of the fishermen flare up and down, while, the canoes are being heaped with fish for the before daylight market in Papeete. The still air is heavy with perfume, into which occasionally penetrates the pungent odour of the copra piled in bags about the wharf. Along the gently curving grass-covered quay the great pandanus trees lower their branches almost to the ground, bending tenderly as if to caress their mother earth. Through the heavy shade lights twinkle from the toy-like houses, and out of every shadow comes a sweetly m urmured Tahitian song, or a scarcely less melodious ripple of laughter. White-clothed forms flit here and there among the trees, and words of French or Tahitian sound across the water to friends in the canoes upon the lagoon. And above all, idly and slumberous, sounds the deep-toned rumble of the never-ceasing surf upon the distant coral reef. TELLING THE TIME IN CHINA How do they tell the time in China? Broadly speaking—they don’t. Three hundred million peasants rise with the dawn and go to rest at dusk. They seem to have an instinct for time, and when the sun is shining they notice the length of the shadows. Time sticks are used by many Chinese. They are about two feet in length, and made of perfumed sawdust mixed with glue. When lighted, the sticks smoulder for about five hours. They are usually burnt in pairs, so that if one goes out the chances are that the other would smoulder until someone happens to notice, and snips off the unburnt part of the first, so that it starts again level with the other. The double time stick habit so firmly ingrained in the Chinese that many of the upper class carry two watches, lest one go fast or slow, or stops altogether. The drip clock is another Chinese timepiece. A big copper pot stands over a copper basin, leaking into it, and as the basin slowly fills a floating post rises, the level of the top of which is compared with a graduated timescale on the side of the basin. It was introduced from Egypt to China about 1,130 B.C. The official town clock at Canton was a drip clock until a few years ago. It was made in 1315 A.D., and consisted of four covered copper jars on .successive brick steps, the top of each being on a level with the bottom of the one above it, and joined by a little open trough. "There are more highly ornamental and grotesque clocks in China than anywhere else in the world. Generally there are several In one room, all stopped at different times. The owner thinks it just as unreasonable to keep his clocks going all the time as we should if we had several gramophones. They are wound up now and again just for amusement.

THE HARP Older than Rome, older than Babylon, older than the written or pictured story of man is a musical instrument still in everyday use; that instrument is the harp. Who made the first harp? The old Greeks said that Mercury discovered their little harp, called the lyre. These imaginative Greeks tell fascinating stories of the origin of many of our musical instruments, and you should read all you can of Apollo and the nine Muses, for then you will know that music and musical instruments were highly honoured by the Greeks and by all ancient people as being gifts from the gods, and not merely mechanical inventions of man. The Assyrians, Egyptians, Hebrews, Greeks and in fact, all ancient nations, used the harp in one or another of its forms throughout their history. From the small hand-harps (lyres) to the large sizes used in temple worship, these ancient harps were graceful and beautifully ornamented instruments, just as were our earliest, hand-made harpsichords, spinets and clavichords. Through these early centuries the harp was not used as a solo instrument, but rather as an accompaniment to song, recitation or dancing. Instrumental music as solo music is probably not over seven or eight hundred years old and that is a short space of time as compared to the long life of the dance, the song, and dramatic recitation. Ireland in particular is associated with this historic and poetic instrument —the harp. Centuries before St. Patrick converted the Irish kingdoms (there were several kingdoms on the Isle of Erin) an Egyptian wrote this: “There is a city there (in Ireland) whose citizens are most of them harpers, who, as they play, chant sacred hymns to Apollo.” Through the centuries Ireland has been a singing land, a band of minstrelsy, of travelling “troubadours”—as minstrels were called in Southern France. Great festivals of song were held every few years in Erin and such a festival was called a Feis, just as the Welsh called (and still call) their annual tournament of song an Eisteddfod. In early Christian times the Church did not approve of the revelry which these three-day feasts and festivals encouraged, and the Feis was condemned and prohibited. Of course, you know the tune that is sung throughout the world to these well-known words of Thomas Moore: The harp that once through Tara’s halls. The soul of Music shed, Now hangs as mute on Tara's walls As if that soul had fled. FROM SCHOOL ESSAYS The following gems—guaranteed authentic—are culled from school essays: Tea is just like dirt—but it is not dirt, it is tea. The Romans had just as good a civilisation as ours, except for gunpowder. Milk is made of grass and water. One of the most romantic and ethereal birds, mentioned by the poets is the Stormy Petrol. IDENTIFIED A stranger entered a small country post office, and, producing a monevorder, asked for payment. As tile order was for quite a lai-ge amount, and the payee was unknown to the clerk behind the counter, the stranger was asked for some proof of his identity. •'Why, certainly,” he replied, and fished out a postcard: "there—that is my photo."

STORY COMPETITION \ CASH prize of seven shillings ' i **- and sixpence (7s 6d) will be awarded for the best original story, not exceeding 500 words. Second prize, five shillings (ss), Entries should reach Redfeather not later than February 13. Open to Scouts and Guides and young people between the ages of 15 and 20.