The Miraculous Flowering.

On the shore of one of these lakes, said the arboreal fairy tale, there sat one day in the misty long ago a young Maori man and girl. The man pressed his love on the beautiful Kotiro; he sought her for his wife, but the maid laughed—Maori maids are as “kittle cattle” as their Pakeha sisters—and said she'd see; she would wait; she would not accept his love until her suitor—who was an Ariki of high rank and a tohunga too—performed some great and unexampled deed before she would become his wife. She would wed none but a famous man, a man whose exploits no one could outdo.

The lover accepted the challenge. “You shall see what I can do,” he said, He turned to the tree under which they were sitting. It was a Kowhai. The time was about our Pakeha month of August. The tree was quite bare of both flower and leaf.