"I suppose firearms were used?"
"Certainly. Every tribe was well provided at that time. They bought them dearly, too, as the chiefs compelled them to work so fearfully hard at the flax-dressing—Phormium tenax being the purchase-money for muskets—that many died of the unhealthy conditions, marshy levels, and crowded whares in which they lived. However, there was nothing else for it. The tribe which first became armed proceeded at once to crush its nearest neighbour or enemy, as the case might be."
"So it was a case of life and death?"
"Nothing short of it," said Mannering. "The first use which Hongi Ika made of his civilizing visit to England, where he 'stood before kings,' was to grasp the immense significance of the gunpowder invention, and make bad resolutions, to be carried out when he should return to his own country. With characteristic Maori reticence, he kept his own counsel when staying with the worthy pioneer missionary, Marsden, at his house in Parramatta, where Admiral King often met him, and was much struck with his dignified and aristocratic carriage. By the way, it was the admiral's father, Governor King, who took the trouble to return to their own country two deported Maoris from Norfolk Island, where they were languishing in exile, having been carried there with some idea of teaching the art of flax-dressing. This, of course, they could not do."
"Why? Did they not know?"
"Of course not. They were chiefs, and as such incapable of menial labour."
The weather being favourable to the expedition to the pah, Roland Massinger and his fair guide set out with that sanguine expectation of pleasure which the exploration of the unknown in congenial company excites in early youth. The path lay across the cultivated plots of the tribe, where he noticed the neatness and freedom from weeds which everywhere prevailed. The plantations were chiefly on an alluvial flat, through which a creek ran its winding course. It had been swollen by recent rains, so, encountering a small party of women and children carrying baskets, Erena inquired in the vernacular as to the best place to cross. A pleasant-looking woman asked, apparently, who the pakeha was, and after receiving Erena's reply, in which Massinger detected the word "rangatira," laughed as she made a jesting reply, and volunteered to guide them. This she did by leading the way to the side of a boundary fence; from this she extemporized a bridge, which, though narrow, answered the purpose. The pakeha gave a shilling to a bright-eyed elf running beside her, the sudden lighting up of whose face told that the value of coin of the realm was not unknown even in this Arcadian spot.
"What did the woman say?" he asked, as they went on their way towards the steep ascent.
The girl's eyes sparkled with merriment, as she replied—