The infinite patience and delicacy requisite in their bird-snaring and spearing are almost beyond the conception of the civilized townsmen untrained in wood-craft.  To begin with, they had to make the slender bird spears, thirty feet long, out of the light wood of the tawa tree.  A single tree could provide no more than two spears, and the making of them—­with stone tools of course—­took many months.  Think of the dexterity, coolness and stealth required to manage such a weapon in a jungle so dense and tangled that white sportsmen often find a difficulty in handling their guns there!  The silent adroitness needed to approach and spear the wild parrot or wood-pigeon without stirring the branch of a tree would alone require a long apprenticeship to wood-craft.

Maori house-building showed a knowledge of architecture decidedly above that of the builders of Kaffir kraals, to say nothing of the lairs of the Australian blacks.  The poorest huts were definitely planned and securely built.  The shape was oblong, the walls low, the roof high pitched and disproportionately large, though not so much so as in some of the South Sea Islands.  The framework was of the durable totara-wood, the lining of reeds, the outside of dried rushes.  At the end turned to the sunshine was a kind of verandah, on to which opened the solitary door and window, both low and small.  The floor was usually sunk below ground, and Maori builders knew of no such thing as a chimney.  Though neither cooking nor eating was done in their dwelling-houses, and offal of all kinds was carefully kept at a decent distance, the atmosphere in their dim, stifling interiors was as a rule unendurable by White noses and lungs.  Even their largest tribal or meeting halls had but the one door and window; the Maori mind seemed as incapable of adding thereto, as of constructing more than one room under a single roof.  On the other hand, the dyed patterns on the reed wainscoting, and the carvings on the posts, lintel and boards, showed real beauty and a true sense of line and curve.

Still less reason is there to find fault with their canoes, the larger of which were not only strangely picturesque, but, urged by as many as a hundred paddles, flew through the water at a fine speed, or under sail made long coasting voyages in seas that are pacific only in name.  To the carving on these crafts the savage artists added decoration by red ochre, strips of dyed flax, gay feathers and mother-o’-pearl.  Both the building of the canoes and their adornment entailed long months of labour.  So did the dressing of the fibre of the flax and palm-lily, and the weaving therefrom of “mats” or mantles, and of kirtles.  Yet the making of such ordinary clothing was simple indeed compared to the manufacture of a chief’s full dress mat of kiwi feathers.  The soft, hairy-looking plumage of the kiwi (apteryx) is so fine, each feather so minute, that one mantle would occupy a first-rate artist for two years.  Many of these mantles, whether of flax, feathers or dog-skin, were quaintly beautiful as well as warm and waterproof.