THE PINE-TREE DRYAD

Sun (Auckland), Volume IV, Issue 977, 21 May 1930, Page 16

THE PINE-TREE DRYAD

Second-prize Story You must know that long, long ago, when all the world was young, King Neptune had another daughter, who was the idol of the old king’s heart. But little Aqualonia was different from her sister nymphs, for she longed to see the great world-up-above, and the wonderful white shining thing that the little fishes told her of, and often she would ask her old father to tell her tales of that mysterious place, and to tell her of the queer people up there who had two tails. Often, too, when her sister-nymphs were playing in the dark sea caves, she would creep away and curl herself up at the foot of the throne. There she would woo the old king, playing upon her seaharp of coral, inlaid with mother-of-pearl, to tell her of that world of mortals, and she would end with the plea that he would take her there some day. «

But King Neptune would always reply: “Nay, little one, stay here with us in the deep sea caves; play with your sister in the dark grottos of under-the-sea; for the world-up-above is garish and full of vice.” But one dark day the king, enraged by her incessant pleas, and grieved to think that she should prefer another life to the happines she had below, fell into a great passion. He called for his great ninth waves to be liberated from the immense barred cave where he kept them, and these came crashing out,- tumbling and swirling over one another in their haste to destroy. His storm winds, too, he freed, and they sped over the waters lashing the waves to frenzy, and tossing the spray far on high. Mortals thought that a storm had arisen, and no barque ventured out on the high seas. But down below the sea folk knew, and trembled. And little Aqualonia, wide-eyed with terror, stood before the king as he shouted in a voice of thunder: “And you would live amid unhappy mortals? Go, then, you shall, but you will long—oh, how you will long!—for the peace and the happiness of life under the sea. Pine shall be your name, and pine you shall.”

Suddenly the little nymph found herself drifting upward, ever upward, through the waters, and behind her, hand in hand, came her sister nymphs, chanting a sad sea lament. But when they reached the part where the light of upper day filtered through the waters, they too turned and fled, to eave a lonely little figure resting in the furrow of a wave.

The next day there appeared, standing in bare outline against the barren coast, a solitary pine tree, looking out over the waters that thundered and foamed at the base of the cliff. Men wondered and surmised, but only the sea folk knew.

And today you may hear the pine tree dryad sighing for the sea caves and grottos she has lost, sometimes softly like the sound of waters gently lapping the shore. Sometimes her cry deepens to a moan, as of waves washing over the rocks at midnight But sometimes when her soul cries out in agony against the chains that bind her, you can hear the lashing and crashing of wind-driven waves. And all the little pine needles take up her cry of helpless misery, for the spirit of the sea shall never leave her. —Wood Pigeon (Mildred Dale).