On arrival at the Whanganui, great eagerness was everywhere displayed for books and teachers. In a native canoe Henry Williams ascended this noted stream, whose banks were then clothed in all their primeval beauty. Not bush-clad precipices, however, attracted his attention so much as the villages which nestled at their foot. In all of these he was astonished to find Christian worship maintained, though no white teacher had yet passed by that way. These _kaingas_ are all vanished now, and their very names are well-nigh forgotten; but Pukehika (a few miles below Pipiriki) afforded the traveller a memorable experience. At daybreak on Christmas Eve he records that "_three bells for morning prayers were heard from different hamlets in the neighbourhood._" On reading this astonishing statement, one's thoughts fly at once to Kinglake's well-known experience in the Arabian desert, when on a Sunday morning he heard distinctly the bells of his village church at Marlen. But there was no illusion here. The bells were chiefly musket barrels, and they hung in actual raupo chapels built by Maori hands! On leaving the river the expedition had before them a week's march to Taupo. For three days this meant climbing steep mountains and sliding down precipices, creeping along the trunks of fallen trees, or worming a way underneath them. On the fourth morning the travellers emerged into the open country at the foot of Mt. Ruapehu, and took their way across the pumice plateau. Their food was now nearly exhausted, and it was in a "tight-belted" condition that, on the last day but one of the old year, they saw the great lake glittering before them. Villages clustered round its shores, and in most of them there stood a chapel erected at the instance of Chapman and his Rotorua teachers. Williams enjoyed the feeling of being once more on the track of other missionaries; nor did he despise the evidences of their care which met him from time to time on his way--tea and sugar in one place and a horse in another--until he at last reached Rotorua in a somewhat exhausted condition, and was thankful to rest once more on the island, in Morgan's quiet abode. A still more pleasant surprise awaited the dauntless traveller on his further journey to Tauranga. While pushing his way through wet bush, he suddenly met Mr. William Williams, who in the midst of his migration to the east coast had been blown into Tauranga by contrary winds. On entering the village the brothers held a meeting, at which it was resolved to send a missionary to Whanganui without delay, both for the sake of the earnest enquirers in that district, and to afford some companionship to Hadfield in his lonely post at Otaki. The man chosen for this duty was the Rev. J. Mason, who had lately arrived in the country. Henry Williams arrived at his home on Jan. 18th, 1840, in time to negotiate the Treaty of Waitangi, which will fall to be considered in a different connection.