main road; it was a snug, thatched dwelling, very neat and pretty; there was a potato patch, and there was a sweet little flower garden, and honeysuckle twined about the whare and hung over the door. The Blockhouse stood no sieges; its loop-holes never flashed the fire of Enfield or Snider on a yelling horde of Hauhaus. But it is certain that the existence of this chain of posts along the frontier, with the vigilant patrol of the settlers’ cavalry corps, prevented the hostiles from raiding across the border and descending on the out-settlements. There were many scares, and more than once the wives and children on the scattered farmsteads were taken in to the redoubts and blockhouses for the night, while the men of the farms, with carbine and revolver, watched their homesteads and rode patrol along the tracks leading to the Maori country and the fords of the Puniu. They are all gone now, those romance-teeming old blockhouses of our pioneer days. Like many other deserted posts, the Orakau building stood there on the sentry hill-top for many a year, rocking in the gales now that the protecting palisade had gone, until a Crown Lands Commissioner with no interest in historic matters sold it as mere old timber. Few people in those years possessed sufficient prescience and sentiment to help preserve for the new generation of colonists those relics of the adventurous days. Of the redoubts, less easily demolished, a few crumbling earthworks remain here and there. One, I am glad to say, that is very well preserved is the Armed Constabulary redoubt at Alexandra—now Pirongia—garrisoned up to 1883. The village English Church stands in the centre of the work to-day. I give a sketch-plan of this last surviving example of the old frontier forts.