the abstract. The church register was lost some six years
before, when "Granny", who was a hundred, if a day, was supposed to
be about twenty-five. The teacher had to guess the ages of all the new
pupils.

August was apparently the oldest in the school--a big, ungainly, awkward
girl, with a heavy negro type of Maori countenance, and about as much
animation, mentally or physically, as a cow. She was given to brooding;
in fact, she brooded all the time. She brooded all day over her school
work, but did it fairly well. How the previous teachers had taught her
all she knew was a mystery to the new one. There had been a tragedy in
August's family when she was a child, and the affair seemed to have cast
a gloom over the lives of the entire family, for the lowering brooding
cloud was on all their faces. August would take to the bush when things
went wrong at home, and climb a tree and brood till she was found and
coaxed home. Things, according to pa gossip, had gone wrong with her
from the date of the tragedy, when she, a bright little girl, was
taken--a homeless orphan--to live with a sister, and, afterwards, with
an aunt-by-marriage. They treated her, 'twas said, with a brutality
which must have been greatly exaggerated by pa-gossip, seeing
that unkindness of this description is, according to all the best
authorities, altogether foreign to Maori nature.

Pa-gossip--which is less reliable than the ordinary washerwoman kind,
because of a deeper and more vicious ignorance--had it that one time
when August was punished by a teacher (or beaten by her sister or
aunt-by-marriage) she "took to the bush" for three days, at the
expiration of which time she was found on the ground in an exhausted
condition. She was evidently a true Maori or savage, and this was one of
the reasons why the teacher with the literary ambition took an interest
in her. She had a print of a portrait of a man in soldier's uniform,
taken from a copy of the 'Illustrated London News', pasted over the
fireplace in the whare where she lived, and neatly bordered by vandyked
strips of silvered tea-paper. She had pasted it in the place of honour,
or as near as she could get to it. The place of honour was sacred
to framed representations of the Nativity and Catholic subjects,
half-modelled, half-pictured. The print was a portrait of the last Czar
of Russia, of all the men in the world; and August was reported to have
said that she loved that man. His father had been m