To the English reader, and to most of those who have arrived in New Zealand within the last thirty years, it may be necessary to state that the descriptions of Maori life and manners of past times found in these sketches owe nothing to fiction. The different scenes and incidents are given exactly as they occurred, and all the persons described are real persons. Contact with the British settlers has of late years effected a marked and rapid change in the manners and mode of life of the natives, and the Maori of the present day are as unlike what they were when I first saw them as they are still unlike a civilised people or British subjects. The writer has therefore thought it might be worth while to place a few sketches of old Maori life on record before the remembrance of them has quite passed away; though in doing so he has by no means exhausted an interesting subject, and a more full and particular delineation of old Maori life, manners, and history has yet to be written. OLD NEW ZEALAND; A TALE OF THE GOOD OLD TIMES. BY A PAKEHA MAORI. "Of Anthropophagi, and men whose heads Do grow BETWEEN their shoulders." OLD NEW ZEALAND. Chapter I. Introductory. -- First view of New Zealand. -- First sight of the natives, and first sensations experienced by a mere Pakeha. -- A Maori chief's notions of trading in the old times. -- A dissertation on "courage." -- A few words on dress. -- The chief's soliloquy. -- The Maori cry of welcome. Ah! those good old times, when first I came to New Zealand, we shall never see their like again. Since then the world seems to have gone wrong somehow. A dull sort of world this now. The very sun does not seem to me to shine as bright as it used. Pigs and potatoes have degenerated; and everything seems "flat, stale, and unprofitable." But those were the times!--the "good old times"--before Governors were invented, and law, and justice, and all that. When every one did as he liked,--except when his neighbours would not let him, (the more shame for them,)--when there were no taxes, or duties, or public works, or public to require them. Who cared then whether he owned a coat?--or believed in shoes or stockings? The men were bigger and stouter in those days; and the women,--ah! Money was useless and might go a begging. A sovereign was of no use except to make a hole in and hang it in a child's ear. The few I brought went that way, and I have seen them swapped for shillings, which were thought more becoming. What cared I? A fish-hook was worth a dozen of them, and I had lots of fish-hooks. Little did I think in those days that I should ever see here towns and villages, banks and insurance offices, prime ministers and bishops; and hear sermons preached, and see men hung, and all the other plagues of civilization. I am a melancholy man. I feel somehow as if I had got older. I am no use in these dull times. I mope about