The whole process of making the simplest of these dresses shows a degree of patient, industrial enterprise, highly creditable to the operators. First of all, the flax (_Phormium tenax_) was gathered, dried, macerated, beaten, and the fibre picked out with the fingers, combed, bleached, and otherwise prepared. By these arduous and laborious processes it was entirely freed from the gum which permeates the leaf, and could be wound into thread of various degrees of fineness. That accomplished, it was woven into cloth, upon a frame of wooden pins stuck into the ground. Fringes and embroidery were manufactured with the simplest possible appliances, and the juice of sundry trees, plants, and berries, yielded good dyes of different hues. The kaitaka, a toga with a silky gloss and texture, was very highly esteemed; but a still rarer and most valuable garment was the Weweru mo te huru kiwi, or toga of kiwi's feathers. This was an ample robe of woven flax, upon the outside of which were the feathers. Now, as each feather of the kiwi is about two or three inches long, and only a line or so in breadth—more like a coarse hair than any other feather, in fact—and as each feather was separately worked into the texture of the flax, and as these feathers were so plentifully disposed upon the mat as to give it the appearance of thick fur, some idea may be gained of the prodigious labour involved in making such a toga, from first to last. The commonest and coarsest mat took a woman six months to make; the kaitaka took much longer; while the feather robe occupied the exclusive time of several women for a period of two or three years. But then, it was a grand property, lasting not only a lifetime, but capable of being handed down from generation to generation. It was quite impervious to rain or wind, and though somewhat bulky, was of light weight. Besides these, a chief prized his robe of long-haired white and yellow dogskins. There was another kind of closely-woven dress, te pukaha, which served as defensive armour against javelins and lances, before the introduction of muskets. There were various differences of make, indicating a species of sumptuary law; but all the dresses, of men and women, of chiefs and slaves, had the same common characteristics.