"Then the old man said, '_Kua tuwhera te rori mou_' ('The road is open to you.') He permitted me to return to Taranaki, and sent four of his men to escort me through the King Country to Waitara." The last quarter-century of Kimble Bent's life has not carried much adventure. Living amongst the Maoris, he acquired some reputation as a "medicine-man." During his wild life in Maoridom he had become expert in the rude pharmacopœia of the bush, and learned to extract potent medicines from the plants of the forest. Native herbs and tree-bark and leaves, prepared in various ways, are exceedingly valuable remedies. The knowledge of these herbal remedies, gained from many a _tohunga_ and wise woman of the bush tribes, the white man now turned to practical account. His fame as a doctor reached Parihaka, the village of Te Whiti, the Prophet of the Mountain. The prophet's people sent for the white medicine-man to come and heal the sick. He spent a week in Parihaka, and returned to his Taiporohenui hut with more money in his pocket than he had possessed since he left his old home-town of Eastport to see life in England. "And I was luckier than most _pakeha_ doctors," says the old man, "for none of my patients died!" * * * * * And so the tale of "Tu-nui-a-moa" is told, and we take our leave of the old _pakeha_-Maori--Kimble Bent, sailor, soldier, outlaw, Hauhau slave, cartridge-maker, _pa_-builder, canoe-carver, medicine-man, and what not--sitting smoking his pipe in the midst of his Maori friends. He is still living with the natives; working in their food-gardens, fishing with them, house-building for them. A grey old man, of mild and quiet eye, who might easily be taken for some highly respectable shopkeeper who had spent all his life in city bounds. Yet no man probably has lived a wilder life, using the term in the sense of an intimate acquaintance with primeval, passionate savagery, and with the ever-near face of death. He is the sole living white eye-witness of the secret Hauhau war-rites; the only white man who has survived to tell of those terrible deeds in the bush, to tell the story of the last Taranaki war from the inner side--the Maori side. Bent has reached the age of seventy-three; and now the old man's thoughts go to his boyhood's home in the far-off State of Maine, and he sometimes expresses a wish to reach his homeland again. "If I could only get a berth on some American sailing-vessel bound for New York or Boston, I'd even now try to work my passage home," he says. "I'd like to die in my mother's land." But that can never be. He is for ever beyond the pale; and he will die as he has lived, a _pakeha_-Maori. APPENDIX TITOKOWARU, THE TARANAKI WAR-CHIEF The following interesting supplementary particulars concerning Titokowaru, one of the leading figures in this book, were supplied to the writer by the Rev. T. G. Hammond, of Opunake, Wesleyan missionary to the Taranaki Maoris: