This was in November, 1860.  For five months General Pratt, in the face of much grumbling, went slowly on sapping and building redoubts.  He always reached his empty goal; but the spectacle of British forces worming their way underground and sheltering themselves behind earthworks against the fire of a few score or hundred invisible savages who had neither artillery nor long-range rifles was not calculated to impress the public imagination.

On the 23rd January, 1861, our respectful prudence again tempted the Maoris to rashness.  They tried a daybreak attack on one of the General’s redoubts.  But, though they had crept into the ditch without discovery, and, scrambling thence, swarmed over the parapet with such resolution that they even gripped the bayonets of the soldiers with their hands, they were attacked, in the flank and rear, by parties running up to the rescue from neighbouring redoubts, and fled headlong, leaving fifty killed and wounded behind.  In March hostilities were stopped after a not too brilliant year, in which our casualties in fighting had been 228, beside certain settlers cut off by marauders.  Thompson, the king-maker, coming down from the Waikato, negotiated a truce.  There seemed yet a fair hope of peace.  Governor Browne had indeed issued a bellicose manifesto proclaiming his intention of stamping out the King Movement.  But before this could provoke a general war, Governor Browne was recalled and Sir George Grey sent back from the Cape to save the position.  Moreover, the Stafford Ministry, which headed the war party amongst colonists, fell in 1862, and Sir William Fox, the friend of peace, became Premier.

For eighteen months Grey and his Premier laboured for peace.  They tried to conciliate the Kingite chiefs, who would not, for a long time, meet the Governor.  They withdrew Governor Browne’s manifesto.  They offered the natives local self-government.  At length the Governor even made up his mind to give back the Waitara land.  But a curse seemed to cling to those unlucky acres.  The proclamation of restitution was somehow delayed, and meanwhile Grey sent troops to resume possession of another Taranaki block, that of Tataramaika, which fairly belonged to the settlers, but on which Maoris were squatting.  Under orders from the King natives, the Ngatiruanui retaliated by surprising and killing a party of soldiers, and the position in the province became at once hopeless.  The war beginning again there in 1863 smouldered on for more than three long and wearisome years.

But the main interest soon shifted from Taranaki.  In the Waikato, relations with the King’s tribes were drifting from bad to worse.  Grey had been called in too late.  His mana was no longer the influence it had been ten years before.  His diplomatic advances and offers of local government were met with sheer sulkiness.  The semi-comic incident of Sir John Gorst’s newspaper skirmish at Te Awamutu did no good.  Gorst was stationed