As for fear, I saw one or two instances to prove he knew very little about it: indeed, to be killed in battle seemed to him a natural death. 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 should 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.