A PAGE for the CHILDREN

Ladies' Mirror, Volume I, Issue 3, 1 September 1922, Page 28

A PAGE for the CHILDREN

{AF all sins, surely ingratitude is one of the blackest. It appeared that this little old lady had adopted a stray young weta, who repaid kindness and affection with the roughest of horseplay and every annoyance in his power. This ungrateful youth, now past the bib and the high chair, had grown beyond control; he had lived through the days when a smile and the raised finger of this kindest of foster-mothers was enough to check him; now he annoyed her unceasingly, and she was afraid of him. He would rush out upon her from behind pieces of wood or toad-stools, shouting, “Hoch!” and flinging up his great legs in the manner of Scotchmen, and when reproved would look most dangerous, lowering his head like an enraged bull. Frequently he unmercifully tickled her under the chin with one of his very long feelers, and she wisely held that all such behaviour was naughty, and robbed her of dignity. To me, the most alarming of the youth’s tricks was the one of flinging up his great legs; not that I feared he might do himself bodily harm, but I had repeatedly seen the grown-up wetas when disturbed in the Ti-tree so prepare to do battle.