Massinger had heard of such personages, but had assuredly never met one in the flesh before. What might such a man not have become, with the favouring conditions which encircle some men's lives? A great general, an admiral, for he was equally at home on land or sea; a prime minister; an explorer; a pastoral magnate in the wide areas and desolate waste kingdoms of Australia, where a thousand square miles wave with luxuriant vegetation during one year, and in the second following are dust and ashes! To any eminence in the wide realms of Greater Britain might he not have ascended, surrounded by staunch friends and devoted admirers, had he chosen to select a career and follow it up with the unflinching determination for which he was proverbial! And, thought this Englishman, what had he done? what was he? A leader of men, certainly--a chief in a savage tribe in a scarce known island, at the very end of the world, content to live and die far from the centres of civilization, the home of his race, the refinements of art, and intellectual contact with his peers. What an existence, what an end, for one who had doubtless started in life with high hopes of success and distinction in the full acceptation of the word, of honourable command and acknowledged eminence! And what had been the clog upon the wheel, the fateful temptation, the enthralling lure potent to sway so strong, so swift a champion from the path sacred to his race, leaving him towards the close of life among shallows and quicksands? What, indeed? mused he, looking up. And, even as he turned, Erena, fresh from an exploration to the fords of a flooded stream which barred their path, presented a living answer to the query. As she stood in the uncertain light which struggled through the forest glades, her eyes bright with triumph and her form transfigured with the momentary gleam of the sun-rays, he could have imagined her a naiad of old Arcadian days, prompt to warn the hero of the approach of danger. Such must have been her mother in the springtime of her beauty, in the year when her father, a youthful Ulysses, appeared as a god newly arisen from the sea before the Nausicaa of the tribe. It was not given to man to resist the o'ermastering spell of such a maiden's love. "The oracle has spoken," he thought. "Is it a warning, or the knell of fate?" "I have found the bridge," she said, her clear tones ringing out through the silent woods, joyous with girlish triumph. "It was made in the old wars, but is still strong. Westward lies the Hokianga." She led the way by a well-worn path which turned at an angle from the ordinary track.