away from Sydney as stowaways in a ship bound for New Zealand, the captain of which, on arrival, had handed them over to the missionaries to be returned to New South Wales.  The men, however, ran away into the country, believing that the natives would reverence them as superior beings and maintain them in comfortable idleness.  They were at once made slaves of.  Had they been strong, handy agricultural labourers, their lot would have been easy enough.  Unfortunately for them, one had been a London tailor, the other a shoemaker, and the luckless pair of feeble Cockneys could be of little use to their taskmasters.  These led them such a life that they tried running away once more, and lived for a time in a cave, subsisting chiefly on fern-root.  A period of this diet, joined to their ever-present fear of being found out and killed, drove them back to Maori slavery.  From this they finally escaped to the Active—­more like walking spectres than men, says an eye-witness—­and resigned, if needs must, to endure once more the tender mercies of convict life in Botany Bay.

More valuable whites were admitted into the tribes, and married to one, sometimes two or three, wives.  The relatives of these last occasionally resorted to an effectual method of securing their fidelity by tattooing them.  One of them, John Rutherford, survived and describes the process.  But as he claims to have had his face and part of his body thoroughly tattooed in four hours, his story is but one proof amongst a multitude that veracity was not a needful part of the equipment of the New Zealand adventurer of the Alsatian epoch.  Once enlisted, the Pakehas were expected to distinguish themselves in the incessant tribal wars.  Most of them took their share of fighting with gusto.  As trade between whites and Maoris grew, each tribe made a point of having a white agent-general, called their Pakeha Maori (Foreigner Maorified), to conduct their trade and business with his fellows.  He was the tribe’s vassal, whom they petted and plundered as the mood led them, but whom they protected against outsiders.  These gentry were for the most part admirably qualified to spread the vices of civilization and discredit its precepts.  But, illiterate ruffians as most of them were, they had their uses in aiding peaceful intercourse between the races.  Some, too, were not illiterate.  A Shakespeare and a Lempriere were once found in the possession of a chief in the wildest part of the interior.  They had belonged to his Pakeha long since dead.  Elsewhere a tattered prayer-book was shown as the only relic of another.  One of the kind, Maning by name, who lived with a tribe on the beautiful inlet of Hokianga, will always be known as the Pakeha Maori.  He was an Irish adventurer, possessed not only of uncommon courage and acuteness, but of real literary talent and a genial and charming humour.  He lived to see savagery replaced by colonization, and to become a judicial officer in the service of the Queen’s Government.  Some of his reminiscences, embodied in a volume entitled Old New Zealand, still form the best book which the Colony has been able to produce.  Nowhere have the comedy and childishness of savage life been so delightfully portrayed.  Nowhere else do we get such an insight into that strange medley of contradictions and caprices, the Maori’s mind.