Worse and worse—who can grow melons in mid-air, drink water without a mouth, or strike a match without something to strike it on? . . . What now? Here is the pakeha, in reply to this reproach, sticking out her thick leather boot right into Pipi’s hand—an insult? She would kick the hikaret’ out of it? Not so, for her eyes are soft. . . . Swift as a weather-cock, round whirl Pipi’s mobile wits.
“E hoa!” she cries with glee. “You give me the hu (shoe)? Poor Pipi no hu, see! I think ka pai, you give me the hu.”
But the pakeha only shakes her head vigorously and laughs out loud. Is she porangi quite? No, not quite, it seems, for, taking a match from Pipi’s hand, she strikes it on the clumsy sole, and lo! a flame bursts out. Pipi can light her hikaret’ now, and does so, coolly using the pakeha’s skirt the while, as a breakwind, for she may as well get out of her all the little good she can. And now, how to get rid of this disappointment, this addled egg, this little, little cockle with the big thick shell? Aha, Pipi knows. She will do what she has done so often with the prying Mrs. Colonel Cameron—she will suddenly forget all her English, and hear and speak nothing but Maori any more. That will soon scrape off this piri-piri (burr). What shall she start by saying? Anything will do; and accordingly she mechanically asks again in Maori her first question, the question she asks every one. “You are going, where?” But, O calamity! This time, the pakeha, the ignorant one, not only understands, but answers—and in the same tongue—and to alarming purpose!
