word about what they've lost. They know better."

But he had hardly emphasized his words with a scornful expectoration when the sudden apparition of two policemen, standing in the middle of the roadway, made him blaspheme with astonishment low down in his throat; but his countenance remained unmoved and serene.

"Good mornin', gentlemen," said Napoleon civilly.

"Don't you 'good mornin'' me, Boswell," said Mr. Trumper, the irate. "We'll just trouble you to hand over that brother of yours, and make no bother about it. I've got a bit of paper for him here, wanting him perticular."

"Maybe you do want him, mister, and so do I," said Napoleon Boswell imperturbably. "You see he owes me a bit of money-not a little bit neither -and if you gentlemen would just be so good as to find him for me, I'd take it as a kindness. Anyways, he ain't here, and what's more, I don't know on God's earth where 'bouts he is."

"That's as it may be, Boswell," said Stackpole. "We'll see."

"Well, have a look then?" said Boswell cheerily.

Whether the police officers expected to find little or much, they found nothing, and after a grim and profound search through the caravans, they confronted Boswell again.

"Now, Boswell, there's another small matter we've got between us," said Stackpole. "There's a pair of handcuffs of mine as one of them young fox cubs of yours stole from me yesterday. I'll trouble you to hand them straight over now, without any of your prevarication."

Mr. Napoleon Boswell's countenance expressed the blankest astonishment, and his wife laughed a mocking incredulous laugh from the caravan.

"Handcuffs! What is de foolish

man talking of?" she cried. "Like as if we had any sort of use for them villainous things in our trade. Keep them for your own beautiful business, and go your ways."

"I tell you, Mrs. Boswell, a son of yours picked my pocket of them yesterday," asserted Mr. Stackpole obstinately, "yesterday afternoon at

about three o'clock."

Mrs. Boswell stared, and then suddenly raised her voice to a scream -and the scream of an infuriated gypsy woman is a truly awesome thing to hear "That's a lie, P'lice Constable! That's a blazin' lie you're tellin' me! You dropped 'em in the road yourself, you did, and you knows it; and it's all in keepin' with your black ways of wickedness blamin' on innocent people things you've done out of your own falseness! Oh, yes, I know you, and the mischief in your minds. I know the mother of you, and she

"

But the police were spared the pain of hearing the history of their mothers, according to Mrs. Boswell, by the intervention of her spouse, who broke in with less vehemence.

"Why, look here now, our son, he's a little lad there, lyin' asleep in the wagon. Go and look at 'im again if you like not seven years old and sleeping as innocent as a daisy. Just you dare tell that story of yours in full Court-tell it in the court, I say-that that tender hinfant up and stole your handcuffs off you, and what do you suppose would happen? Three months for him? No, by the Lord, but years and years and double years of scorn for you. Why, you'd never hear the end of it till you were safe in your coffins."

Mr. Trumper opened his mouth wide to reply, but paused to charge the battery adequately, and Mr. Boswell rushed into the gap. "Don't you talk any more! I won't hear nothin' about it. "Tain't likely we can stop here on the road talkin' such foolishness with

you. We've got to be at Horton Fair, so off you go, gentlemen, and look for the handcuffs in the ditch where you lost 'em. If so be you don't find 'em, you'll find us right enough on the fair ground. Then you can arrest that powerful six-year-old ruffian there if you've a mind to."

Then he took the reins in his fingers, smacked his horse emphatically on the shoulder, and the caravan creaked on its way.

Once or twice Mrs. Boswell was discerned, amiably waving a duster from the caravan window.

The policemen never moved. Mr. Trumper glared a while after the derisive duster, and then turned ferociously upon the disconsolate Stackpole. "I always told you that you were no better than a fool, with all your hartifices and stratergies," he thundered. "It's just them things as will get you into serious trouble some The Cornhill Magazine.

day-a trouble worse nor this 'ere now, if you don't take a deal more care. It's true what Boswell says. You daren't say a word about it, you know you daren't, and this 'ere hincident has been played right through, now for ever."

The caravan disappeared round a bend of the road.

The handcuffs found a final restingplace in the shadowy remoteness of a far corner of Gilderoy Lovell's gorgeous caravan. Occasionally he used pleasantly to contemplate them. When he did so he was sometimes wont to say, "Yes, my Dorelia, it's a faster sort of holding than theirs that holds me and you together. And it was your Poley, do you mind? who went and snapped the fastening to, that fine day when he'd been out a-walking with the police. Dórdi! I could laugh now when I think of it."

R. O. M.

She was a Maori girl of, possibly, sixteen, and by profession a guide in the thermal district of Rotorua, and we yielded ourselves without a struggle to her guardianship when she stepped forward on the bridge at Whakarewarewa, wreathed in smiles and flourishing a silver-topped walkingstick with one hand while she bestowed vigorous handshakes upon us with the other. The village to which she welcomed us contained a few men, numbers of amphibious children, and a pack of undenominational dogs. Ereti, the chief guide, was mourning in the village meeting-house (wharehui), for her old mother had died the night before; but Hara was her cousin and accredited substitute, and, after waving her stick towards the river which bounds Whakarewarewa on two sides to indicate the miscellaneous crowd of

bathers in its chilly waters as an object worthy of a tourist's interest, she led us, all unconscious of her design, straight to the wharehui and firmly pushed us inside. It was an embarrassing introduction to the women of Hara's tribe, but resistance was out of the question. The floor was covered with mourners crouching round the bier, over which feathered quilts were thickly spread and only the dark face of the dead woman, surmounted by heavy coils of iron-gray hair in which a couple of black-tipped huia quills were stuck, was visible. From the mass of mourners a stately figure detached itself. This was Ereti, who silently clasped our hands in a grip that was painful, and then resumed her place. Never have I seen a face expressive of such intense sorrow. The still features might have been cast

in bronze for a bust of Grief itself. Another mourner rose and pressed our hands-Pera, Ereti's half-sister -- but not one of us uttered a word. Hara's black eyes were full of tears when we turned to leave the wharehui, but, once outside, she permitted herself the "comic relief" of poking a stout Maori in the waistcoat with her wand of office, an overture which was kindly received and provoked no reprisals.

But

Our

Brown imps were bathing out in the sunshine in little tanks of warm water and stretching out wet claws for the pennies we did not give them. Our guide led us to a round pool brimming with boiling water, blue as a solution of sapphires, that swirled and danced in its deep basin. "Here," she said, "we used to wash our clothes. two years ago my uncle fell in and we could not get him out. He is here still; but of course he is all to pieces now. Government will not let us wash here any more, and this railing has been put up to keep other people from falling in." This was said in the gentle, level English of the educated Maori, and appropriate comment, such as "How shocking!" died upon lips. Hara wore a sailor-hat with a black ribbon (into which was tucked the inevitable huia quill), a black-andwhite-striped cotton blouse and skirt, black stockings, and laced shoes. A more inoffensively commonplace cos tume could not be imagined. Even her pigtail of stiff, crinkly black hair was tied with the conventional wide white ribbon bow just as the pigtail of an English high-school girl is tied. But the boiling of an uncle would surely have been alluded to in terms more moving by the English high-school girl. Hara's uncle was as likely as not a cannibal at heart, if not in fact -opportunity being denied him by a paternal Government- and the words "we could not get him out" conveyed to our minds, warped by dwelling on the

war-canoes

horrors of Maori history, the idea of a good housekeeper's regret for so much unavoidable waste. Do vegetarians realize that New Zealand produced no animal food whatever when the Maoris drifted thither in their from the North, and that cannibalism was the natural result of this dearth? If there should ever be formed a community of "convinced" vegetarians ready to exile themselves to some far island well supplied only with the provender they affect, they would do well to read up the early history of New Zealand before embarking.

From the blue pool we climbed to Ereti's whare, where a piano and a bookcase full of standard works proclaimed its owner's high degree of intelligence and civilization. Photographs of Governors and Admirals once guided by Ereti were there in plenty, and the closely packed neatness of her little abode was that of the captain's cabin on board a mail steamer. As we made our way between high ti-hedges and across a wooden bridge to the mudgeysers, I asked Hara if there were any very old Maoris in Whakarewarewa who remembered the long war with the English. "Yes, there are some very old," she answered cheerfully, "but now we die very young: many between twenty and thirty." This, alas! is sadly true. The civilization which has dressed Hara in a black-and-white cotton frock, and tied up her pigtail with a white ribbon, has brought with it the seeds of consumption. The feather-covered "mats" worn by the uncivilized Maori were thrown aside altogether when damp in the days before imported propriety exacted the habitual wearing of a complete costume; but European garments composed mainly of cotton are not healthy when worn wringing wet, and the modern Maori has not yet learnt that they should be changed.

The old Maoris killed one another in

fierce and never-ending tribal warfare; their descendants fall a ready prey to alcohol and to the germs of diseases undreamt of a century ago. In physique they are much inferior to their forefathers, and it was the passion for firearms that began the mischief. As long as they were spear-throwers and lived on high ground in fortified and almost inaccessible positions, whither they had to retire when attacked, the Maoris were a robust people; but with the advent of the musket they descended to the lowlands in the centre of areas fit for cultivation, and there erected dwellings to the scope of their new weapons. Enormous quantities of flax (scraped by hand with a shell) were given in exchange for a single musket and a small supply of ammunition, and the strain of incessant hard work in the flax swamps, combined with the semistarvation caused by the inevitable neglect of their food-crops, sapped their vitality. What a text is here for the peace-preservationist! But he must use it gingerly, for with spear, tomahawk, and mere (club) the untutored Maoris had gone a long way towards mutual extermination before ever the use of the musket was known in their land. It is interesting to reflect that, although the peace-preservationist and the Little Englander think we should be a much happier and holier race if we had never founded any colonies, they themselves, as a matter of fact, would have fared badly in the overpopulated, under-victualled, and dependent England of their dreams. They might, indeed, have been eaten.

In spite of national defects and imported vices and failings, the Maori, of all colored men, stands highest in one respect in the white man's estimation. A white man does not lose caste by marrying a Maori girl, and no New Zealander is ashamed of having Maori blood in his veins. Hara, who is wait

ing to show us a tiny boiling pool, actually no more than a hand's-breadth from the cool reed-fringed waters of the rushing brown river, may marry a white man one day and be welcomed and respected by his people. She is very brown, it is true, and her lips are undeniably thick; but the Maori head is as superior to the head of a West African Negro as a nugget of gold is to a cake of soap or a cheap football.

One of

A

The walking-stick now calls our attention to a group of mud-geysers, dirty gray, like much-handled semiliquid putty, which bubble and squirt and cluck almost unceasingly. them grunts like a pig in a little well if its own, and some achieve the most grotesque and kaleidoscopic contortions as they chuckle and writhe. gargoyle face with three ever-shifting eyes and pouting lips is the worst of all, and we stand and watch it till we can contemplate its peculiarly offensive ugliness no longer. Then Hara leads us on very carefully (for a false step or a slight deviation from the narrow track might plunge us into a bottomless pit of boiling nastiness), and halts before the brush-concealed mouth of a rocky cave. "Here a chief was hidden for three years," she says. "His friends used to bring him food; but at last his enemies found him, cut off his head and boiled his brains in the brainpot over there." The "brain-pot," a round caldron of petrified mud, has run dry of late, but, like most of the pools. and geysers in this district, it is probably intermittent in its activity. One important geyser, Waikiti, stopped spouting the very day, fourteen years ago, that the railway to Rotorua was opened, but woke up again eighteen months back. Another spouts every quarter of an hour, and a third every three minutes, so if the passer-by does not know their idiosyncrasies, and forgets to consider how the wind sits, douches of hot sulphur-scented water,.