Page:More Australian legendary tales.djvu/109

 must not eat us. You are our mother. We are the girls you lost. The old wirreenun changed us into frogs because we but laughed at the mäh of his tribe, saying the back of it, the back of the emu, was humped as was his. You cannot eat us." And loud was the croaking, and so frightened was the woman that she turned and sped quickly through the bush back to the camp with the mournful cry still ringing in her ears, and a vision of the piteous eyes ever before her.

She went straight to the old wirreenun and said: "Did you change my girls into youayah, which are crying now even in the bush?"

"I did so," said he, quite proud the woman had seen proof of his power.

"Why did you so? Why should you leave me to grow old with no daughter to care for me?"

"Did you not choose their father rather than me? Why should I think of you now? Let their father change them again. Surely he is more powerful than I am, since you chose him before me? I am but a humped-back one, so your girls said, even as they said my mäh was, the dinewan. Well you must know that to scoff at the mäh of a man is to make war with his tribe, yet I war not; I but turn your daughters into such as have voices which none heed; no more can they scoff at the back of a dinewan. Go, woman, eat them. Youayah is food that is good." So he taunted the woman who once in her youth had scorned him.

"How should I, a mother, eat her young? What talk is that you make? But alas! surely another will find them and eat them. Only you can save them. Change them