with the letter. It was to tell Mr. Lee the heavy luggage he had sent on by packet had been brought up from the coast all right.

"You could get a ride behind Hirpington's messenger," said the men to Edwin, "and beg him to come to our help." The Maori readily assented.

They were soon ascending the hilly steep and winding through a leafy labyrinth of shadowy arcades, where ferns and creepers trailed their luxuriant foliage over rotting tree trunks. Deeper and deeper they went into the hoary, silent bush, where song of bird or ring of axe is listened for in vain. All was still, as if under a spell. Edwin looked up with something akin to awe at the giant height of mossy pines, or peered into secluded nooks where the sun-shafts darted fitfully over vivid shades of glossy green, revealing exquisite forms of unimagined ferns, "wasting their sweetness on the desert air." Amid his native fastnesses the Maori grew eloquent, pointing out each conical hill, where his forefathers had raised the wall and dug the ditch. Over every trace of these ancient fortifications Maori tradition had its fearsome story to repeat. Here was the awful war-feast of the victor; there an unyielding handful were cut to pieces by the foe.

How Edwin listened, catching something of the eager glow of his excited companion, looking every inch—as he knew himself to be—the lord of the soil, the last surviving son of the mighty Hepé, whose name had struck terror from shore to shore.

As the Maori turned in his saddle, and darted suspicious glances from side to side, it seemed to Edwin some expectation of a lurking danger was rousing the warrior spirit within him.

They had gained the highest ridge of the wall of rock, and before them gloomed a dark descent. Its craggy sides were riven and disrupted, where cone and chasm told the same startling story, that here, in the forgotten long ago, the lava had poured its stream of molten fire through rending rocks and heaving craters. But now a maddened river was hissing and boiling along the channels they had hollowed. It was leaping, with fierce, impatient swoop, over a blackened mass of downfallen rock, scooping for itself a caldron, from which, with redoubled hiss and roar, it darted headlong, rolling over on itself, and then, as if in weariness, spreading and broadening to the kiss of the sun, until it slept like a tranquil lake in the heart of the hills. For the droughts of summer had broadened the muddy reaches, which now seemed to surround the giant boulders until they almost spanned the junction.

Where the stream left the basin a mass of huge logs chained together, forming what New Zealanders call a "boom," was cast across it, waiting for the winter floods to help them to start once more on their downward swim to the broader waters of the Waikato, of which this shrunken stream would then become a tributary.

On the banks of the lake, or rota—to give it the Maori name—Edwin looked down upon the high-peaked roofs of a native village nestling behind its protecting wall.

As the wind drove back the light vapoury cloudlets which hovered over the huts and whares (as the better class of Maori dwellings are styled), Edwin saw a wooden bridge spanning the running ditch which guarded the entrance.

His ears were deafened by a strange sound, as if hoarsely echoing fog-horns were answering each other from the limestone cliffs, when a cart-load of burly natives crossed their path. As the wheels rattled over the primitive drawbridge, a noisy greeting was shouted out to the advancing horseman—a greeting which seemed comprised in a single word the English boy instinctively construed "Beware." But the warning, if it were a warning, ended in a hearty laugh, which made itself heard above the shrill whistling from the jets of steam, sputtering and spouting from every fissure in the rocky path Nga-Hepé was descending, until another blast from those mysterious fog-horns drowned every other noise.

With a creepy sense of fear he would have been loath to own, Edwin looked ahead for some sign of the ford which was his destination; for he knew that his father's friend, Mr. Hirpington, held the onerous post of ford-master under the English Government in that weird, wild land of wonder, the hill-country of the north New Zealand isle.

CHAPTER II.

THE WHARE BY THE LAKE.

A deep fellow-feeling for his wild, high-spirited guide was growing in Edwin's mind as they rode onward. Nga-Hepé glanced over his shoulder more than once to satisfy himself as to the effect the Maori's warning had had upon his young companion.

Edwin returned the hasty inspection with a look of careless coolness, as he said to himself, "Whatever this means, I have nothing to do with it." Not a word was spoken, but the flash of indignant scorn in Nga-Hepé's brilliant eyes told Edwin that he was setting it at defiance.

On he spurred towards the weather-beaten walls, which had braved so many a mountain gale.

A faint, curling column of steamy vapour was rising from the hot waters which fed the moat, and wafted towards them a most unpleasant smell of sulphur, which Edwin was ready to denounce as odious. To the Maori it was dear as native air: better than the breath of sweet-brier and roses.

Beyond the bridge Edwin could see a pathway made of shells, as white and glistening as if it were a road of porcelain. It led to the central whare, the council-hall of the tribe and the home of its chief. Through the light haze of steam which veiled everything Edwin could distinguish its carved front, and the tall post beside it, ending in a kind of figure-head with gaping mouth, and a blood-red tongue hanging out of it like a weary dog's. This was the flagstaff. The cart had stopped beside it, and its recent occupants were now seated on the steps of the whare, laughing over the big letters of a printed poster which they were exhibiting to their companions.

"Nothing very alarming in that," thought Edwin, as Nga-Hepé gave his bridle-rein a haughty shake and entered the village. He threaded his way between the huts of mat and reeds, and the wood-built whares, each in its little garden. Here and there great bunches of home-grown tobacco were drying under a little roof of thatch; behind another hut a dead pig was hanging; a little further on, a group of naked children were tumbling about and bathing in a steaming pool; beside another tent-shaped hut there was a huge pile of potatoes, while a rush basket of fish lay by many a whare door.

In this grotesque and novel scene Edwin almost forgot his errand, and half believed he had misunderstood the hint of danger, as he watched the native women cooking white-bait over a hole in the ground, and saw the hot springs shooting up into the air, hissing and boiling in so strange a fashion the English boy was fairly dazed.

Almost all the women were smoking, and many of them managed to keep a baby riding on their backs as they turned their fish or gossiped with their neighbours. Edwin could not take his eyes off the sputtering mud-holes doing duty as kitchen fires until they drew near to the tattooed groups of burly men waiting for their supper on the steps of the central whare. Then many a dusky brow was lifted, and more than one cautionary glance was bestowed upon his companion, whilst others saw him pass