had, as a point of honour, to be endured without cry or complaint; or he could coolly bungle the execution of the design, or leave it unfinished, and betake himself to a more generous customer.  A well-known tattooing chant deals with the subject entirely from the artist’s standpoint, and emphasises the business principles upon which he went to work.  It was this song that Alfred Domett (Robert Browning’s Waring) must have had in his mind when, in his New Zealand poem, he thus described the Moko on the face of the chief Tangi-Moana:—­

  “And finer, closer spirals of dark blue
  Were never seen than in his cheek’s tattoo;
  Fine as if engine turned those cheeks declared
  No cost to fee the artist had been spared;
  That many a basket of good maize had made
  That craftsman careful how he tapped his blade,
  And many a greenstone trinket had been given
  To get his chisel-flint so deftly driven.”

When, however, the slow and costly agony was over, the owner of an unusually well-executed face became a superior person.  He united in himself the virtues and vices of a chieftain of high degree (shown by the elaborateness of his face pattern), of a tribal dandy, of a brave man able to endure pain, of the owner of a unique picture, and of an acknowledged art critic.  In the rigid-looking mask, moreover, which had now taken the place of his natural face were certain lines by which any one of his fellow-tribesmen could identify him living or dead.  In this way the heads of Maori chiefs have been recognised even in the glass cases of museums.  On some of the earlier deeds and agreements between White and Maori, a chief would sign or make his mark by means of a rough reproduction of his special Moko.

The Maori pas or stockaded and intrenched villages, usually perched on cliffs and jutting points overhanging river or sea, were defended by a double palisade, the outer fence of stout stakes, the inner of high solid trunks.  Between them was a shallow ditch.  Platforms as much as forty feet high supplied coigns of vantage for the look-out.  Thence, too, darts and stones could be hurled at the besiegers.  With the help of a throwing-stick, or rather whip, wooden spears could be thrown in the sieges more than a hundred yards.  Ignorant of the bow-and-arrow and the boomerang, the Maoris knew and used the sling.  With it red-hot stones would be hurled over the palisades, among the rush-thatched huts of an assaulted village, a stratagem all the more difficult to cope with as Maori pas seldom contained wells or springs of water.  The courage and cunning developed in the almost incessant tribal feuds were extraordinary.  Competent observers thought the Maoris of two generations ago the most warlike and ferocious race on earth.  Though not seldom guilty of wild cruelty to enemies, they did not make a business of cold-blooded torture after the devilish fashion of the North American Indians.  Chivalrous on occasion, they would sometimes send