The Maori _pas_ or stockaded and intrenched villages, usually perched on cliffs and jutting points overhanging river or sea, were defended by a double palisade, the outer fence of stout stakes, the inner of high solid trunks. Between them was a shallow ditch. Platforms as much as forty feet high supplied coigns of vantage for the look-out. Thence, too, darts and stones could be hurled at the besiegers. With the help of a throwing-stick, or rather whip, wooden spears could be thrown in the sieges more than a hundred yards. Ignorant of the bow-and-arrow and the boomerang, the Maoris knew and used the sling. With it red-hot stones would be hurled over the palisades, among the rush-thatched huts of an assaulted village, a stratagem all the more difficult to cope with as Maori _pas_ seldom contained wells or springs of water. The courage and cunning developed in the almost incessant tribal feuds were extraordinary. Competent observers thought the Maoris of two generations ago the most warlike and ferocious race on earth. Though not seldom guilty of wild cruelty to enemies, they did not make a business of cold-blooded torture after the devilish fashion of the North American Indians. Chivalrous on occasion, they would sometimes send warning to the foe, naming the day of an intended attack, and abide thereby. They would supply a starving garrison with provisions in order that an impending conflict might be a fair trial of strength. War was to them something more dignified than a mere lawless struggle. It was a solemn game to be played according to rules as rigidly laid down and often as honourably adhered to as in the international cricket and football matches of Englishmen and Australians. As is so often the case with fighting races capable of cruelty, they were strictly courteous in their intercourse with strangers. Indeed, their code of manners to visitors was so exact and elaborate as to leave an impression of artificiality. No party of wayfarers would approach a _pa_ without giving formal notice. When the strangers were received, they had the best of everything, and the hosts, who saw that they were abundantly supplied, had too much delicacy to watch them eat. Maori breeding went so far as to avoid in converse words or topics likely to be disagreeable to their hearers. Their feeling for beauty was shown not merely in their art, but in selecting the sites of dwelling-places, and in a fondness for shady shrubs and trees about their huts and for the forest-flowers. The natural images and similes so common in their wild, abrupt, unrhymed chants and songs showed how closely they watched and sympathised with nature. The hoar-frost, which vanishes with the sunrise, stood with them for ephemeral fame. Rank without power was "a fountain without water." The rushing stream reminded the Maori singer, as it did the Mantuan, of the remorseless current of life and human fate.