At last, after many speeches, a grim old warrior of great experience got on his hind-legs. Quoth he: “Men of Wanganui, we have done all in our power to persuade the white chief not to go, but he insists on doing so, notwithstanding the predictions of certain disaster we have received. We are bound by honour to accompany him; besides, we languish for a fight. The taua will be defeated and the white men cut to pieces, which will serve them right for neglecting this warning. But we, my children, having protested against such godless profanity, will escape without injury, and as we go in honour we shall, provided we fight bravely, all return safe with our honour enhanced.” This speech ended the meeting and the friendlies determined to come with us. Now you good people who live at home at ease may laugh at a white man believing, or even tolerating, the prophecies of a savage devil-dodger, but very many experienced frontiersmen, in the course of their pilgrimage through wild countries and among wild races, come across so many queer and uncanny incidents quite inexplicable to their philosophy, therefore they are not so ready to laugh at or deny that which they cannot understand. Consequently many of our old hands believed in the sombre prognostications of the Tohungas, and perhaps were not wrong in doing so, for if the proof of the pudding is in the eating of it, surely the value of a prophecy is in the veracity of its fulfilment, and on this occasion the soothsayers certainly scored the straight tip, as on the next day the friendly natives, although they fought with a reckless gallantry never surpassed in the annals of war, and while covering our retreat exposed themselves in a manner that even astonished the fanatical Hau Haus, yet, during the whole disastrous affair, they had not one single man scratched, while what happened to us white men I shall now relate. [Illustration: COL. WHITMORE.] Well, this difficulty being satisfactorily overcome, we paraded at ten-thirty P.M. on the 6th, two hundred white men and seventy Maoris, a force quite sufficient had the former been of the same calibre as the old rangers and military settlers, but alas, out of the two hundred, not more than forty men had ever been in the bush before, and these old hands had no confidence in their inexperienced comrades; in fact, the old joyous devil-may-care spirit so noticeable in the ranks when starting on past expeditions was on this parade entirely wanting, and the old war-dogs looked more as if they were attending their grandmother’s funeral than starting for a jolly romp with the Hau Haus in the bush. Anyhow we started, the night being bitterly cold, with a very heavy frost that gave our nearly naked allies jip, laming their bare feet to such an extent that some of them were crippled for weeks afterwards, so that even they did not escape scot-free, but were in some way punished for accompanying their ungodly and incredulous white comrades.