“Our fellow-travellers, with Wisihona their chief, were all assembled, and we followed them to the shed where the act had been perpetrated, and where the body still lay as it fell, but covered with a blanket. The mourners were gathered round, and the women commenced crying most dolefully, wringing their hands, and bending their bodies to the earth. We approached the body, and were permitted to remove the blanket from the face and breast. The countenance was perfectly placid, and the yellow tint of the skin, combined with the tattooing, gave the corpse almost the appearance of a wax model. The deceased was a fine and well-made young man. He had placed the musket to his breast, and deliberately pushed the trigger with his toes, the bullet passing right through his lungs. Blood was still oozing from the orifice made by the bullet, and also from the mouth, and the body was still warm.” The cause of this suicide was that which has already been mentioned. The young man had been detected in an illicit correspondence with the wife of another man in the same village. The woman had been sent away to a distant settlement, a proceeding which had already made her lover sullen and gloomy; and, on the day when Mr. Angas visited the place, he had become so angry at the reproaches which were levelled at him by some of his relations, that he stepped aside and shot himself. The determined manner in which the New Zealanders will sometimes commit suicide was exemplified by the conduct of another man, who deliberately wrapped himself up in his blanket, and strangled himself with his own hands. The crime was perpetrated in the common sleeping-house, and was achieved with so much boldness that it was not discovered until the man had been dead for some time. A remarkable instance of this phase of New Zealand law took place when Mr. Dieffenbach visited the Waipa district. He was accompanied by a chief, who called a girl to him, and handed her over to the police magistrate as a murderess. The fact was, that her brother, a married man, had formed an intimacy with a slave girl, and, fearing the vengeance of his wife’s relatives, had killed himself. His sister, in order to avenge the death of her brother, found out the slave girl in the bush, and killed her. The strangest part of the business was, that the accused girl was the daughter of the chief who denounced her. The girl pleaded her own cause well, saying, what was perfectly true, that she had acted according to the law of the land in avenging the death of her brother, and was not amenable to the laws of the white man, which had not yet been introduced into her country. As might be imagined, her plea was received, and the girl was set at liberty; but her father was so earnest in his wish to check the system of retaliatory murder, that he actually offered himself in the place of his daughter, as being her nearest relation. CHAPTER LXXIX. NEW ZEALAND--_Continued_. DRESS.