the same reason of convenience in communication, and also because fish
was a chief article of their diet. All the land near the rivers has been
at some time under their cultivation, and the light bush has grown up
upon it since.

So late as fifty years ago, the Ngatewhatua tribe, who were lords of the
Kaipara, were very numerous; but were then nearly exterminated in a war
with the Ngapuhi of the north. Still, numerous as they may have been
then, they could not have held the immense tracts here under
cultivation. That must date from a more remote period. But the places
where their villages stood, in the early part of this century, are now
buried under such a wealth of scrub and shrubbery, as to show very
clearly how rich is the soil and how fruitful the climate.

We see at last what we have long been looking for, hitherto to no
purpose, namely, Maoris and their habitations. Brown, gypsey-like people
they appear in the distance, wearing ordinary clothes like Europeans,
only dirty and ragged usually. Here and there we pass a cluster of their
whares, low down near the beach--brown huts of thatch-like appearance,
for they are made of raupo grass. Some of them are very neat, with
carved and painted doors and fronts. Near them is usually some fenced-in
cultivation, and possibly a rough-grassed clearing, on which may be a
few cattle or horses. There are always pigs and dogs visible, and brown
naked children disporting themselves on the beach, where canoes are
drawn up, fishing nets spread out, and a scaffolding erected to dry
shark-meat upon.

Few and far between are these evidences of the native race, and few and
far between, also, are evidences of the new nation that is supplanting
it. Frere, the statesman, speaking of Spain, said--he loved it because
God had so much land there in His own holding. If he could say that of
Spain's bare sierras and bleak barrancas, what would he not have said of
this land, whose splendid woods and forests clothe the hills and fill
the glens with verdure.

Here and there we lie off some settler's station, a white wooden
homestead, perhaps with a few outbuildings beside it, perhaps alone;
round it the pastures won by the axe and the fire, a mere bite out of
the boundless woods behind. At such places "The Crew" paddles ashore in
the dingey, or possibly a boat comes off to us, bearing two or three
bushmen, who, may be, think that the opportunity for getting a nobbler
ought not to be suffered t