I recall the solemn grandeur of the New Zealand bush, the cry of the melancholy curlew in the forest as I tramped along the wild tracks to Rotorua. I had my violin with me, and in the strange perspective of memory I still hear and see the romping, sunburnt bush children rushing out by the bush homesteads to welcome the troubadour who had suddenly appeared. Once or twice I got pretty hard up and had to resort to my violin’s appealing voice for help.
Not far from a little bush township, by a range of hills that rolled to the westward, I came across another pah, where my fiddle and I were welcomed by the old Maori chiefs, whose blinking eyes lit up their tattooed faces. I remember I was warmly received by that primitive community. It seemed hard to believe that they were descendants of bloodthirsty cannibals as I sat among them and accompanied their songs, songs that breathed tenderness and poetry. The character of their music strikingly resembled Samoan melodies I had heard sung by the Siva chorus girls in the South Sea villages. The following suggests the atmosphere of Samoan or Maori music:—
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I will tell you a native fairy tale, as nearly as I can remember just as the pretty mouth of Mochau, the Maori girl, told it to me. One evening she was singing sweetly while I strummed a tinkling accompaniment on my violin. The shadows were falling over the forest karri-trees and across the slanting roofs of the whares, and the sunset fire blazed the lake waters until they seemed a mighty burnished mirror that reflected the Maori village, with its sloping roofs and the romping children on the banks. “Good-bye, Mochau, I must go home now,” I said at last, and the old chief, Mochau’s father, looked up as he squatted with his back against a tree and said, his tattooed, wrinkled face smiling: “You stay in pah till to-morrow?”
“All right,” I replied; and then Mochau’s eyes shone with pleasure, and her bunched hair flew out in the soft forest breeze as she ran across the patch into the whare to peel the potatoes and boil corn-cobs for supper. After supper the kind old chief and his pretty daughter sat by me on the slope; the moon shone over the lake and was reflected in the still water, wherein the gum-trees stood upside down in a shadow world.