The boat is, however, darting towards the shore, rapidly propelled by four stout natives. My friend ---- and the chief are on board. The chief has got his eye on my double gun, which is hanging up in the cabin. He takes it down and examines it closely. He is a good judge of a gun. It is the best _tupara_ he has ever seen, and his speculations run something very like this:--"A good gun, a first-rate gun; I must have this; I must _tapu_ it before I leave the ship [here he pulls a piece of the fringe from his cloak and ties it round the stock of the gun, thereby rendering it impossible for me to sell, give away, or dispose of it in any way to anyone but himself]; I wonder what the pakeha will want for it! I will promise him as much flax or as many pigs as ever he likes for it. True, I have no flax just now, and am short of pigs, they were almost all killed at the last _hahunga_; but if he is in a hurry he can buy the flax or pigs from the people, which ought to satisfy him. Perhaps he would take a piece of land!--that would be famous. I would give him a piece quite close to the _kainga_, where I would always have him close to me; I hope he may take the land; then I should have two pakehas, him and ----. All the inland chiefs would envy me. This ---- is getting too knowing; he has taken to hiding his best goods of late, and selling them before I knew he had them. It's just the same as thieving, and I won't stand it. He sold three muskets the other day to the Ngatiwaki, and I did not know he had them, or I should have taken them. I could have paid for them some time or another. It was wrong, wrong, very wrong, to let that tribe have those muskets. He is not their pakeha; let them look for a pakeha for themselves. Those Ngatiwaki are getting too many muskets--those three make sixty-four they have got besides two _tupara_. Certainly we have a great many more, and the Ngatiwaki are our relations, but then there was Kohu, we killed, and Patu, we stole his wife. There is no saying what these Ngatiwaki may do if they should get plenty of muskets; they are game enough for anything. It was wrong to give them those muskets; wrong, wrong, wrong!" After-experience enabled me to tell just what the chief's soliloquy was, as above.