Jog on, jog on, the footpath way,[2]
And merrily hent the stile-a;
A merry heart goes all the day,
Your sad heart tires in a mile-a.
—Shakespeare.
[2] Carved above the porch of the Summit Road Rest House on Dyer’s Pass.
Chapter IV.
RAPAKI: A VILLAGE BY THE SEA.
In the little Maori kainga of Rapaki, folded away in a valley-fan of Lyttelton harbour-side, there is a tiny, steep-roofed church, of old-fashioned build, and by the side of this church stands a twisty-branched old ribbonwood tree, that in summer showers over porch and steeple its sweet, snowy blossoms, scented like the orange tree. On the lowermost bough of this knotty ribbonwood, the houhi , or houi , of the Natives, that stood here before the church was built, over fifty years ago, hangs the bell that calls the remnant of Ngati-Irakehu to worship; and it is this sylvan belfry that symbolises for me the intermingling of modernism and ancientry in the Rapaki of to-day. Like the other hapus of the Ngai-Tahu tribe, the Ngati-Irakehu and their kin are now half-pakeha in blood; they have intermarried with their European neighbours, and their little township, with its sixty odd souls, is scarcely to be taken at first sight for a Maori settlement. The communal house, of characteristic Native build, with its carved frontal barge-boards and its gargoyle-like tekoteko perched above the entrance, familiar to travellers in the Native districts of the North, is wanting here; but a survey of the village scheme, with its tree-shaded cottages grouped sociably about the central green space, and the hall and school-house and church, soon makes it plain that here stood an old-time Maori kainga , of totara slabs and raupo thatch, with maybe a tall stockade guarding its landward side and stretching from cliff to cliff of the little boulder-beached bay. The plan is the same; the buildings have changed, for Rapaki to-day believes in
