Kihikihi settlement was given up that week to a Kingite carnival of feasting and war-dancing and speech-making, and the Maori camp at Rewi’s house and in the neighbouring field rang night and morning with the musical sound of the Hauhau hymns, the service of the Tariao, the “Morning Star,” chanted by hundreds of voices. Some unconventional scenes there were, characteristic of the frontier life. For instance, there was the pakeha-Maori dance on the main road in Kihikihi that symbolised the final unifying of the two races. The dashing Hote Thompson, the King-maker’s son, a fighting man of renown, paraded in all the glory of Hauhau war-paint in front of his savage-looking soldiery, and called for a pakeha lady partner to dance “te lancer” with him, and then out stepped a settler’s handsome wife, and the accomplished Hote led her through the mazes of the lancers in the middle of the crowd on the dusty road with as much grace as if he had been young Lochinvar himself. True, Hote wore only a shawl in place of trousers, and his face was blackened with charcoal dabbed on for a haka, but none the less he was a pretty gallant. Had that pakeha dancer been a reader of Bret Harte she might have recalled the historic dance on “Poverty Flat”: “The dress of my queer vis-a-vis, And how I once went down the middle With the man that shot Sandy McGee.” There was no law but the Maori chieftains’ law south of the Puniu River until after 1883, when Te Kooti was pardoned and a general amnesty to Maori rebels was proclaimed. For policy reasons the Kingites were left pretty much to themselves for some time after Tawhiao laid down his guns at Major Mair’s feet at Alexandra in 1881, and when John Rochfort and Charles Wilson Hursthouse, setting out from Kihikihi, carried flying surveys through the Rohepotae, the state of the country from the Puniu for a hundred miles southward was not very different in essentials from that of the Scottish Highlands in the period described by Mr Neil Munro in his adventure romances that carry a tang of Stevenson’s “Catriona.”