in solitary places, exclaiming often, "Oh! where are those good old times?" and echo, or some young Maori whelp from the Three Kings, answers from behind a bush,--No HEA. I shall not state the year in which I first saw the mountains of New Zealand appear above the sea; there is a false suspicion getting about that I am growing old. This must be looked down, so I will at present avoid dates. I always held a theory that time was of no account in New Zealand, and I do believe I was right up to the time of the arrival of the first Governor. The natives hold this opinion still, especially those who are in debt: so I will just say it was in the good old times, long ago, that, from the deck of a small trading schooner in which I had taken my passage from somewhere, I first cast eyes on Maori land. It _was_ Maori land then; but alas! what is it now? Success to you, O King of Waikato. May your _mana_ never be less!--long may you hold at bay the demon of civilization, though fall at last I fear you must. Plutus with golden hoof is trampling on your landmarks. He mocks the war-song; but should _I_ see your fall, at least one Pakeha Maori shall raise the _tangi_; and with flint and shell as of old shall the women lament you. Let me, however, leave these melancholy thoughts for a time, forget the present, take courage, and talk about the past. I have not got on shore yet; a thing I must accomplish as a necessary preliminary to looking about me, and telling what I saw. I do not understand the pakeha way of beginning a story in the middle; so to start fair, I must fairly get on shore, which, I am surprised to find, was easier to _do_ than to describe. The little schooner neared the land, and as we came closer and closer, I began in a most unaccountable manner to remember all the tales I had ever heard of people being baked in ovens, with cabbage and potato "fixins." I had before this had some considerable experience of "savages," but as they had no regular system of domestic cookery of the nature I have hinted at, and being, as I was in those days, a mere pakeha (a character I have since learned to despise), I felt, to say the least, rather curious as to the then existing demand on shore for butchers' meat.