Yes—the trembling wood is seen,
Standing straight and growing green.
THE RETURN OF THE WAR CANOE
And, surely enough, as they sang, the severed trunk rose and reunited, and every flake and chip of bark and wood flew together straightway. Then Rata, calling out to them, followed the injunctions given him. They talked with him, and in the end he was told to go away and return next morning. When he came back, lo! in the sunshine lay a new war-canoe, glorious with black and red painting, and tufts of large white feathers, and with cunning spirals on prow and tall stern-post, carved as no human hand could carve them. In this canoe he sailed over the sea to attack and destroy the murderer of his father.
Lovers of the New Zealand forest, who have to live in an age when axe and fire are doing their deadly work so fast, must regret that the fairies, defenders of trees, have now passed away. Of yore when the Maori were about to fell a tree they made propitiatory offerings to Tané and his elves, at any rate when the tree was one of size. For, so Tregear tells us, they distinguished between the aristocracy of the forest and the common multitude. Totara and rimu were rangatira, or gentlemen to whom sacrifice must be offered, while underbrush might be hacked and slashed without apology. So it would seem that when Cowley was writing the lines—
Hail, old patrician trees so great and good;
Hail, ye plebeian underwood!
he was echoing a class distinction already hit upon by the fancy of tattooed savages in an undiscovered island. Now all things are being levelled. Great Tané is dead, and the children of the tree-god have few friends. Perhaps some uncommercial botanist or misliked rhymester may venture on a word for them; or some much-badgered official may mark out a reserve in fear and trembling. Canon Stack, who knew the Maori of the South Island so well, says that half a century ago the belief in fairies was devout, and that he often conversed with men who were certain that they had seen them. One narrator in particular had caught sight of a band of them at work amid the curling mists of a lofty hill-top where they were building a stockaded village. So evident was the faith of the man in the vision he described that Canon Stack was forced to think that he had seen the forms of human builders reflected on the mountain-mist, after the fashion of the spectre of the Brocken.
