It may happen that a tribe is driven off its lands by a conquering tribe, who may hold possession of the conquered lands for many years, but be, in their turn, driven off by the assistance of tribes allied to the original possessors of the land. It then becomes a question what right the allied tribes acquire in the recovered lands. A case of this sort came under my notice thus: I was instructed to purchase for the Government a piece of land of moderate size at Maketu to be occupied as a Mission station. As I had built a house on this land on a title of mere right of occupation, or as expressed in Maori, “_Noho noa iho_,” and had resided there for some time, I thought, naturally, that the persons, at whose invitation my house had been placed there, were the persons to whom the land belonged. An arrangement was therefore made with them for the purchase of the land required, and a price agreed on. One night shortly after I was awoke from sleep by a knocking at the door of my house. My visitors were a deputation from some of the tribe Tapuika who had a small _Pa_ below my house by the river side, at some distance from the large _Pa_ by the mouth of the river. Their business was to warn me not to complete the purchase of the land, the persons with whom I had contracted being, as they affirmed, only occupiers and not owners thereof; whereas their tribe Tapuika were the owners, and the _mana_ of the land belonged to their chief Te Koata. They came by night because they did not wish their interference to be known publicly, as it would cause disputes. And it did cause dispute when their nocturnal visit and its object was made public the next morning. However a good result came of it, for it was agreed that the question of title should be referred to the decision of the chiefs of the whole Arawa tribes. A general assembly of the tribes consequently met at Rotorua, when it was shown that the land I proposed to purchase came within the old boundaries of Tapuika. But several generations before the present the _Pa_ at Maketu had been taken by the hostile tribe Ngatiawa, and the Arawa tribes, including Tapuika, had been driven from the sea-coast to Rotorua and elsewhere. When the flax trade with Sydney was in vigour, many of the Arawa natives had been permitted to return to scrape flax for sale to a trader named Tapsell who was stationed at Maketu; and at length the combined Arawa tribes expelled Ngatiawa, and recovered the lands of their forefathers. They then established themselves in force at Maketu, and some of them marked out by boundaries, and took possession of land originally belonging to Tapuika, for their own use. Tapuika did not offer any objection to this, but now said that the land so taken was merely given up for their occupation, and that the _mana_ of their chief Te Koata over the land had never been given up.