The Superintendent was no sooner gone than a kind of solemn grief seemed to come over the assembled people. After all, they were selling the graves of their ancestors, they argued. The wife of Hamuéra, seizing her husband‘s greenstone club, ran out from the ranks of the women, and began to intone an impromptu song, which was echoed by the women, in a pathetic chorus-chant: “The sun shines, but we quit our land: we abandon forever its forests, its mountains, its groves, its lakes, its shores. All its fair fisheries, here, under the bright sun, forever we renounce. It is a lovely day; fair will be the children that are born to-day; but we quit our land. In some parts there is forest; in others, the ground is skimmed over by the birds in their flight. Upon the trees there is fruit; in the streams, fish; in the fields, potatoes; fern-roots in the bush; but we quit our land.” It is in chorus-speeches of this kind that David‘s psalms must have been recited by the Jews; but on this occasion there was a good deal of mere acting in the grief, for the tribes had never occupied the land that they now sold. The next day, Dr. Featherston drove into camp surrounded by a brilliant cavalcade of Maori cavalry, amid much yelling and firing of pieces skyward. Hunia, in receiving him, declared that he would not have the money paid till the morrow, as the sun must shine upon the transfer of the lands. It would take his people all the night, he said, to work themselves up to the right pitch for a war-dance; so he sent down a strong guard to watch the money-chests, which had been conveyed to the missionary hut. The Ngatiapa sentry posted inside the room was an odd cross between savagery and civilization; he wore the cap of the native contingent; and nothing else but a red kilt. He was armed with a short Wilkinson rifle, for which he had, however, not a round of ammunition, his cartridges being Enfield and his piece unloaded. Barbarian or not, he seemed to like raw gin, with which some Englishman had unlawfully and unfairly tempted him. In the morning, the money was handed over in the runanga-house, and a signet-ring presented to Hunia by Dr. Featherston in pledge of peace, and memory of the sale; but owing to the heat, we soon adjourned to the karaka grove, where Hunia made a congratulatory and somewhat boastful speech, offering his friendship and alliance to Dr. Featherston. The assembly was soon dismissed, and the chiefs withdrew to prepare for the grandest war-dance that had been seen for years, while a party went off to catch and kill the oxen that were to be “steamed” whole, just as our friends’ fathers would have steamed us.