"The Maoris are picturesque, especially at the more popular tourist resorts, where their presence lends a particularly charming romance to the occasion. The emotional tourist--especially if a young gentleman from 'Home'--who is safely piloted by the alert, polite, and loquacious 'Maggie' among the roaring and exploding geysers of that charming compromise between awe-inspiring beauty and terror, that unpreached sermon, that unsung song, that unwritten poem, that section of hell in an earthly paradise, Rotorua, in whose weird precincts are seen and heard and smelled, at close range, the seething fires of 'Pluto's dread abode,' he will cherish a generous respect for Maori hospitality forever. Under Maggie's watchful guidance, the most unsophisticated tourist could safely approach the yawning mouth of these boiling caldrons without endangering life or health or appetite; though, unless one heeds the cautious guide, the boot soles are in danger of shrinking, and in these sulphurous regions 'kuss words' flow from pious lips. "Nature," Oseba argued, "was a unity and is consistent. She ignores individuals, and strives, oblivious to time, for universals. No created thing ever escapes the influence of environment. But Nature carries out her works with the instruments at hand. Whence came these Maoris is a guess, but as in character, stature, proportion, personal bearing, and mental possibilities, no other savage on the globe compares with them, they must have been sufficiently long in Zelania to have become modified by, and made to conform to, the luring conditions of that wonderful country." But I must continue:-- As there were no indigenous grains or tameable animals, and as no people ever worked out a civilisation without the assistance of tameable animals, the Maori could only remain a savage, but the climate and general aspect of Nature, the peculiar environing conditions, gave him the noblest soul and most fertile intellect ever housed in the brain of a barbarian. The conduct of the Maoris in defence of their country, considering the relative conditions of the contending forces, found no parallel in history or romance. They had all the cunning and duplicity of the Greek, the stubborn courage of the ancient Briton, and the stoical disdain for death of the North American Indian. While in the whirligig of the great world's doings a contest between the most skilful of all warriors and a few small tribes of savages, in so remote a country, could excite no very great interest among the far-away nations, to the watchful student of events there were few pages of history more interesting than the Maori wars in Zelania. Socially, the Maori was of a peculiar mould. A communist in property, he was an aristocrat by nature, and in his soul there was a haughty exuberance of spirit that rendered tribal discipline difficult, and domestic peace precarious. In war, the Maori was brave; in diplomacy, shrewd; in council, a born orator.