For a bit of New Zealand colour you may turn to Colenso’s description of a certain morning in early October when he found himself on a high hill-top in face of Mount Ruapehu. Snow had fallen in the night and the volcano was mantled heavily therewith. The forest and native village on the hill on which Colenso stood were sprinkled with white, and, though the rising sun was shining brightly, a few big flakes continued to flutter down. Outside the village a grove of kowhai was covered with golden-and-russet blossoms, all the more noticeable because the young leaves were only on the way. Suddenly from the evergreen forest a flock of kakas descended on the kowhais, chattering hoarsely. The great parrots, walking out on the underside of the boughs to the very end of the branches, began to tear open the flowers, piercing them at the side of their base and licking out the honey with their brush-tipped tongues. Brown-skinned Maori boys climbing the trees brought to the naturalist specimens of the blossoms thus opened by the big beaks. The combination of the golden-brown flowers and green forest; the rough-voiced parrots, olive-brown and splashed with red, swaying on the slender branch-tips; and the sunlight gleaming on the white snow, made, with the towering volcano in the background, a picture as brilliant as curious. Whatever the dim flowers, purple fruit, and glossy leaves of many of our plants might lead the imaginative to expect, the number that are poisonous is very small. Only two examples are conspicuous, and but one does any damage to speak of. Of the noxious pair the karaka, a handsome shrub, is a favourite garden plant, thanks to its large polished leaves and the deep orange colour of its fruit. It has been a favourite, too, with the Maori from time immemorial. They plant it near their villages, and they claim to have brought it in their canoes from Polynesia. Botanists shake their heads over this assertion, however, the explanation of which is somewhat similar to a famous statement by a certain undergraduate on the crux of the Baconian controversy. “The plays of Shakespeare,” said this young gentleman, “were not written by him, but by another fellow of the same name.” It seems that there is a Polynesian karaka in the islands where the Maori once dwelt, but that it is no relation of the New Zealand shrub. The affection of the Maori for the latter was based on something more practical than an ancestral association. They were extremely fond of the kernel of its fruit. When raw, this is exceedingly bitter and disagreeable--fortunately so, for it contains then a powerful poison. Somehow the Maori discovered that by long baking or persistent steaming the kernels could be freed from this, and they used to subject them to the process in a most patient and elaborate fashion. Now and then some unlucky person--usually a child--would chew a raw kernel and then the result was extraordinary.