In a magical art studio, there lived a little red paint called Penny. She was a bright and cheerful paint, always dreaming of one day spreading her color across a beautiful picture. One sunny morning, her friend Greeny, a little green paint, came bouncing along, knocking on her tiny jar.
“Penny! Penny! Let’s go and paint a picture!” cried Greeny.
Penny was delighted. “Oh, I should love to come, but I am afraid of the great big brushes,” she said.
“Don’t be frightened, we’ll soon get used to them,” replied Greeny. So he tipped over the jar and send little Penny tumbling out.
Then away they went, Greeny marching in front, and Penny rolling after as fast as her little red feet could carry her. Along the shelf they went, across the table, and out towards the artist’s great fresh canvas stretched out before them. But just then they heard a frightened squeak behind them.
“I don’t like this journey at all!” squeaked the voice. “I do wish I had stayed at home.”
“Don’t be a coward!” replied Greeny. “Come along and you will enjoy it.”
Then out tumbled another little paint—a bright yellow, called Yolly, who had run away to join the little red and the little green. So together they danced and rolled and hopped—and if you had seen them, you would have thought they were in a fairy ring—till they reached the artist’s great fresh canvas stretched out before them.
Here they met their old friend Blueny, who looked very blue indeed—she was so frightened that she would not stir. But Pansy, the violet paint, they found dancing and prancing on the canvas, which was dancing too just then, for it had just been stretched on a new frame.
“Come and join us,” cried Pansy. “The canvas will never eat you as the great brushes do when they come crawling this way.”
So the other little paints took courage and jumped up on the canvas too, except little Blueny, who was crying very hard in her little blue jar, and Greeny, who went back to comfort her. But soon they both came in and the music of the brushes could be heard drawing near.
“We must form a floor on the canvas,” said Pansy, “and represent each of us by a little dancing girl carrying a rose.”
The other paints agreed, and they became the rainbow flower girls as the brushes came creeping and crawling this way. They rejoiced to think their new canvas a happy one, with dancing flower girls who wore the same colors as themselves, and were picked off and put into the great brushes and turned round and round. Still with their running did Pansy, Yolly, and Penny ensure themselves—although they never paused with laughter and dancing. And so even Greeny, who was last being taken for the brushes, and said:—
“Cheerio! cheerio! that I could not fight;”
and sang happily all the songs of the Flower Girls.
But the artist was very sad—for the picture of the Rainbow Flower Girls was never painted.
The seventeenth of July is the National Day of Ireland, and in that country the girls wear a rainbow-colored sash. at that Pansy, the violet paint, first ran off her feet. And there will be many places in Ireland, in the year 1910—mind it, will you?—to see this new rainbow versus sash. They are sure to have been glad and sad in the wearing, for days of rejoicing and pages of mourning have passed since the girls first chose, as the Irish paint a bag of flies for a prize.