The effect of a life of this kind was observable, plainly enough, in my friend. He was utterly devoid of what weak mortals call "compassion." He seemed to have no more feeling for the pain, tortures, or death of others than a stone. Should one of his family be dying or wounded, he merely felt it as the loss of one fighting man. As for the death of a woman or any non-combatant, he did not feel it at all, though the person might have suffered horrid tortures; indeed I have seen him scolding severely a fine young man, his near relative, when actually expiring, for being such a fool as to blow himself up by accident, and deprive his family of a fighting man. The last words the dying man heard were these:--"It serves you right. There you are, looking very like a burnt stick! It serves you right--a burnt stick! Serves you right!" It really _was_ vexatious. A fine stout young fellow to be wasted in that way. As for fear, I saw one or two instances to prove he knew very little about it; and, indeed, to be killed in battle, seemed to him a natural death, and he was always grumbling that the young men thought of nothing but trading: and whenever he proposed to them to take him where he might have a final battle (_he riri wakamutunga_), where he might escape dying of old age, they always kept saying, "Wait till we get more muskets," or "more gunpowder," or more something or another, "as if men could not be killed without muskets!" He was not cruel either; he was only unfeeling. He had been guilty, it is true, in his time, of what we would call terrific atrocities to his prisoners, which he calmly and calculatingly perpetrated as _utu_ or retaliation for similar barbarities committed by them or their tribe. And here I must retract the word guilty, which I see I have written inadvertently, for according to the morals and principles of the people of whom he was one, and of the time to which he belonged, and the training he had received, so far from being guilty, he did a praiseworthy, glorious, and public-spirited action when he opened the jugular vein of a bound captive and sucked huge draughts of his blood. To say the truth he was a very nice old man, and I liked him very much. It would not, however, be advisable to put him in a passion; not much good would be likely to arise from it, as indeed I could show by one or two very striking instances which came under my notice, though to say the truth he was not easily put out of temper. He had one great moral rule,--it was indeed his rule of life,--he held that every man had a right to do everything and anything he chose, provided he was able and willing to stand the consequences, though he thought some men fools for trying to do things which they could not carry out pleasantly, and which ended in getting them baked. I once hinted to him that, should every one reduce these principles to practice, he himself might find it awkward, particularly as he had so many mortal enemies. To which he