We remained three weeks at Hokitika, and were then fortunately sent back from our Capua to sterner work, landing at Patea just barely in time for the Colonel to quiet another shindy, as the natives had stopped the survey on the Makoia Block, and although he managed, by his vast knowledge of Maori manners, to tide over this trouble, yet it was evident the billy was boiling and must soon boil over, for now everyone could see, with the exception of those wilfully blind, that war was imminent, as the natives now commenced openly to steal every horse and head of stock they could lay their hands on; so the early months of 1868 passed. Some very foolish acts on the part of the resident magistrate and commissioner hurried on the inevitable climax, but yet the perpetrators of these follies still swore the sham peace would be a lasting one and objected to order in the few settlers who had the temerity to cling to their farms. It would take too long to relate the wretched details of that miserable time, but eventually they culminated in the cold-blooded and brutal murder on 9th June of three harmless bushmen while peaceably at work. Colonel McDonnell was at the moment in Wanganui, from whence he at once returned, and did all in his power to secure the safety of the district, but we were so short-handed that, even with the forts inadequately garrisoned to an alarming extent, he had not one man to take the field with. He therefore made a flying visit to Wellington to try and instil some glimmer of reason into the wilful numskulls who formed the ministry, receiving, after much persuasion, leave to enlist three hundred white men, together with one hundred Maoris, for a service of not longer than three months. Now the men were wanted for immediate service, so that there was no time to pick or choose them, nor was there time to train them when chosen, and it must be remembered that the population of New Zealand forty odd years ago was much smaller than it is now, also that the goldfields were booming and really good men scarce. Yet even then, in the towns, there were numbers of loafers and riff-raff who, too lazy to go in for hard colonial work, hung about the cities waiting for what they call a suitable billet to turn up, and it was from the ranks of these useless unemployed that the great majority of the three hundred white men were enlisted.