TREASURE TROVE

King Country Chronicle, Volume XXIV, Issue 3239, 6 December 1930, Page 6

TREASURE TROVE

(By Janet Grant Ewen.)

When I announced my intention of going for a walk the whole family, with the exception of dad, began to protest. Mac was the first, I grieve to say. "Silly ass," he muttered, "you ought to be thankful you don't have to go down that filthy road." Mac would have gone down the said road on his hands and knees, blindfold, to a football match rather than miss it; his objection was merely to getting the cows. Mother,- came next with: "It's not a very nice day, dear,

and yo.u are not strong enough to walk far yet"; and Margie finished the protest: "It's horrid of you, after all our anxiety about you and all that nursing and dope to go and court trouble. Can't you see the selfishness of it?" I'll admit that took any anticipated joy out of the scheme. Then dad came to the rescue. "Marg, that's a pretty catty speech and I won't stand for it. None of you have ever been a prisoner for two months, unable to help yourselves, and entirely subject to the opinion of your nurses as to what you might or might not do. The sun is warm and there is no wind . A walk won't hurt her." Then to me: "Put on some goloshes and come with me." Dad's smile was

heart-warming and mother nodded acquiescence, so I went-

Have you ever been shut in from the dear'world for months till the sight of a tomtit at your window nearly made you cry with joy? I have. Outdoors it looked to me like an entirely new world. Until you have come suddenly very close to leaving this beautiful earth you never really see things, at least I hadn't. I left dad at our gate talking sheer treason about the Government to an irate neighbour and strolled on. There's a cutting further on, its steep sides a miracle of colour—in the middle of June! Trails of pale lycopodium, mosses in every conceivable shade of brown, green and grey; lichens lavender, grey, sulphur and palest green, pink-tipped fern fronds, and odd berries, far-flung from a giant white pine glowing redly against the dainty pastels of weathered sandstone and rhyolite. All that sheer beauty lavished on a cutting on the roadside. The longer I looked the more I found, but one little speck of something pink fascinate 1 me. It looked like the tiniest pink flower on an equally small stem and though I hated dragging it from its surroundings I wanted badly to find out what it was. So I cut out about an inch of moss and carried it carefully. Only a step further on there were fantails at play. So quick their movements one can hardly follow them. Are they so joyous that that little piping song cannot express it all? There they were, chasing and darting, looping the .loop in an ecstasy of movement. It makes one feel so envious. Doesn't it? We are too restarined and selfconscious nowadays even to sing for mere gladness, and dancing is no longer an instinct but a pastime or an art. Perhaps away back fui*ther than we can think primeval man gambolled like the bunnies and the fantails, but he was so very primeval! I can't say I like the idea, do you?

The fantails flitted away and the sun went under a cloud and suddenly the joy had gone out of things. I wanted home and the big chair by the grate badly. But first I would have a gorgeous handful of blackberry leaves (the roadside is covered with them—"it's a disgrace, why don't the Guv'ment do something about it?"), all crimson "and ruby and purple and gold they fall from their shrunken trailers into my hand. Wearily I «. - ept up the path and laid my gay burden on the kitchen table. "Heavens! How lovely," exclaimed Margie with generous warmth, and deftly arranged them in her pet bowl. Much later on I looked at my minute garden beneath a powerful glass. I think it must be a flowering moss—the stem is like a piece of tiny grey green coral, ever so pale and dainty and no more than half an inch high, with wee salmon flowers and buds—petalless, just a tiny glistening circle of colour like a little round dab of icing. There are five of them on my inch of moss. Treasure trove!