A wilderness that vast country of the Rohepotae lay for many a year. The cultivations of the Maoris, even the fields of wheat and oats around such settlements as Araikotore—the patriarchal Hauauru’s village—or the large patches of potatoes and maize at Tokanui and Tokangamutu—it is Te Kuiti to-day—gave but scanty relief from the general impression of an unused virgin expanse of fern prairie and woody mountain land. At Otewa, on the Upper Waipa, lived the notorious and dreaded Te Kooti, in outlawed isolation far from his East Coast birthland, ever since his final skirmish with Captain Preece’s Arawa force in the Urewera Country in the beginning of 1872. Not until after John Bryce’s peace-making with him at Manga-o-rongo in 1883 did the white-haired old cateran venture out into the pakeha settlements. Then miles away to the west, on the beautiful slopes of Hikurangi, giving on to the fertile basin of the Waipa and overlorded by the Pirongia Range, there was the great camp of King Tawhiao and his exiled Waikato, several hundreds of them, looking down with many mournings on the good lost lands and the lost battlefields of the Sixties. Later, they moved down to Te Kopua, yonder by Kakepuku’s fern-shod heel, and then to Whatiwhati-hoe, the Place of the Broken Paddles, on the level banks of the Waipa. In the mid-Eighties they migrated in their canoes, a picturesque tribe-flitting, past Pirongia, down the Waipa and down the Waikato, back to their old ancestral homes, or what was left of those homes, on the west side of the Lower Waikato. But they never had a more lovely or more inspiring home in all their wanderings than those sun-bathed slopes of rich volcanic land on the high shoulder of Hikurangi, where the road to-day goes over the range to Kawhia. Now the once wild country across the border has become the highway of the motor-car, has become dotted with scores of lively European settlements, with large towns with electric light and asphalted footpaths, churches and police stations, tennis lawns and bowling greens, stock sale-yards and all the other varied furnishings of an advanced day. Hauhauism is a far-off tale of the past; descendants of old king-like Wahanui and the one-time followers of the Pai-marire and Tariao fanatic faiths have fought beside Waikato and King Country white soldiers on the fields of Gallipoli and France. Yet the names of the old trail-breakers, the stories of the heroic missionaries, soldiers, surveyors, road-builders, should not be forgotten by those who look out from their carriage windows or their cars or from their comfortable farmhouses on this well-favoured land of the Waipa slopes and the old Aukati frontier. CHAPTER XIII. KIHAROA THE GIANT. A FOLK-TALE OF THE TOKANUI HILLS. This curious tradition, gathered from the last of the old learned men of the Ngati-Maniapoto tribe, is given as a typical example of the Maori folk-lore with which the King Country abounds.