warning to the foe, naming the day of an intended attack, and abide thereby.  They would supply a starving garrison with provisions in order that an impending conflict might be a fair trial of strength.  War was to them something more dignified than a mere lawless struggle.  It was a solemn game to be played according to rules as rigidly laid down and often as honourably adhered to as in the international cricket and football matches of Englishmen and Australians.

As is so often the case with fighting races capable of cruelty, they were strictly courteous in their intercourse with strangers.  Indeed, their code of manners to visitors was so exact and elaborate as to leave an impression of artificiality.  No party of wayfarers would approach a pa without giving formal notice.  When the strangers were received, they had the best of everything, and the hosts, who saw that they were abundantly supplied, had too much delicacy to watch them eat.  Maori breeding went so far as to avoid in converse words or topics likely to be disagreeable to their hearers.

Their feeling for beauty was shown not merely in their art, but in selecting the sites of dwelling-places, and in a fondness for shady shrubs and trees about their huts and for the forest-flowers.  The natural images and similes so common in their wild, abrupt, unrhymed chants and songs showed how closely they watched and sympathised with nature.  The hoar-frost, which vanishes with the sunrise, stood with them for ephemeral fame.  Rank without power was “a fountain without water.”  The rushing stream reminded the Maori singer, as it did the Mantuan, of the remorseless current of life and human fate.

  “But who can check life’s stream? 
     Or turn its waters back? 
        ’Tis past,”

cried a father mourning for his dead son.  In another lament a grieving mother is compared to the drooping fronds of the tree-fern.  The maiden keeping tryst bids the light fleecy cloudlets, which in New Zealand so often scud across the sky before the sea-wind, to be messengers to her laggard gallant.

  “The sun grows dim and hastes away
  As a woman from the scene of battle,”

says the lament for a dead chief.[1] The very names given to hills, lakes, and rivers will be witnesses in future days of the poetic instinct of the Maori—­perhaps the last destined to remain in his land.  Such names are the expressive Wai-orongo-mai (Hear me, ye waters!); Puke-aruhe (ferny hill); Wai-rarapa (glittering water); Maunga-tapu (sacred mount); Ao-rere (flying cloud).  Last, but not least, there is the lordly Ao-rangi (Cloud in the heavens), over which we have plastered the plain and practical “Mount Cook.”

[Footnote 1:  The Maori is deeply imbued with the poetry of the woods.  His commonest phraseology shows it.  ’The month when the pohutu-kawa flowers’; ‘the season when the kowhai is in bloom’; so he punctuates time.  And the years that are gone he softly names’ dead leaves!’—­HAY, Brighter Britain.]