“ * * * I obeyed, though I was fast consuming my tongue by merciless mastication. But honour is due to the order of a man like General Cameron, so I ordered my men off and marched to where the firing still continued. [6] “The two churches lay more towards the left flank of the village. The firing continued more to our right near the centre of the village. As we approached that point we got a few long-range shots from distant whares, but took no notice of them. “In passing a boarded house, however, one more like the building of a European than a Maori, two shots were rapidly fired at us from its verandah. I did not believe my eyes when I saw there a woman coolly sitting on the verandah and hiding a still smoking double-barrel underneath it. She was decently dressed in the semi-European style adopted by influential Maoris. She was oldish, and not very fair to look at, particularly as her time-worn features were bent into one concentrated expression of hatred—such a hatred as Johnson revered and you read of occasionally in old plays. “I went up to her and had the gun taken away, looking at her all the time, not knowing whether I should laugh or feel pathetic—the coolness, the ugliness, and reckless hatred of this specimen of Maoridom puzzling my choice of sentiment exceedingly. I thought of passing on, just with a warning for future good behaviour, when some officers shouted to me that ‘the old wretch’ had also fired at them, wounded a man of the 65th, and been warned already, and that I had better take her prisoner. “Reluctantly I gave her in charge of one of my men, but accompanied the order with a Freemason’s sign which my man understood, the result of which was that the woman afterwards quietly slipped away unnoticed. “Just as we started again we heard another couple of shots from the same house, and now thinking that some men might be inside I had the house surrounded. “Just as Roberts got to the back part, another fairy burst from its door, and, running with the fleetness of a deer, dropped her gun just in time to have her sex recognised and respected. I was glad that her fleetness saved me from another female responsibility, and proceeded onward. “I met Captain Bower, Adjutant of the Defence Corps, one of the Six Hundred at Balaklava. He looked fearfully excited, and hurriedly told me that Colonel Nixon had just been shot, and that the bullet had gone through his lung.”