the Clutha, while about half as long as the Thames, tears down to the sea bearing far more water than the Nile. Nevertheless the Clutha did not drown Puoho and his men: they made their way to the sea through the open country of the south-east. Then passing on to the river Mataura, they took another village somewhere between the sea and the site of a town that now rejoices in the name of Gore. Then indeed the fate of the Ngaitahu hung in the balance, and the Otago branches of the tribe were threatened with the doom of those of the northern half of the island. They were saved because in Southland there was at the moment their one capable leader in their later days of trouble--the chief Tuhawaiki, whom the sealers of the south coast called Bloody Jack. Hurrying up with all the warriors he could collect, and reinforced by some of the white sealers aforesaid, this personage attacked the Ngatitoa by the Mataura, took their stockade by escalade, and killed or captured the band. Puoho himself was shot by a chief who lived to tell of the fray for more than sixty years afterwards. So the Ngaitahu escaped the slavery or extinction which they in earlier days had inflicted on the Ngatimamoe. For, three years after Puoho’s raid, the New Zealand Company appeared in Cook’s Strait, and thereafter Rauparaha and his braves harried the South Island no more. CHAPTER VII OUTLYING ISLANDS The New Zealand mainland--if the word may be used for anything so slender and fragmentary--is long as well as slight. Nearly eleven hundred miles divide the south end of Stewart Island from Cape Maria Van Diemen. If the outposts of the main are counted in, then the Dominion becomes a much larger, though more watery, expanse. Its length is about doubled, and the contrast between the sunny Kermadecs and the storm-beaten Aucklands becomes one of those things in which Science delights. It is a far cry from the trepang and tropic birds (the salmon-pink bo’suns) of the northern rocks to the sea-lions that yawn at the casual visitor to Disappointment Island. The Kermadecs--to employ an overworked expression--bask in the smiles of perpetual summer. The Three Kings, lying thirty-eight miles beyond the tip of the North Island, might be Portuguese isles, and the Chathams--as far as climate goes--bits of France. But the peaty groups of the shivering South lie right across the pathway of the Antarctic gales. Even on their quieter days the grey sky that overhangs them looks down on a sea that is a welter of cold indigo laced with white. Relentless erosion by ocean rollers from the south-west has worn away their western and south-western shores into steep cliffs, cut by sharp-edged fissures and pitted by deep caves. For their vegetation you must seek their eastern slopes and valleys, or the shores of land-locked harbours. On some of the smaller of them, parakeets and other land-birds learn to fly little and fly low, lest they should be blown out to sea.