to
the hot springs for warmth. Their chief occupations are literally
bathing and smoking tobacco, the women using the pipe even more freely
than the men. Of regular occupation they have none. A few potatoes are
planted and allowed to grow without cultivation, and these with pork
form their chief food. The little cooking in which they indulge is
usually performed by the boiling springs, in which they hang their
potatoes in small wicker baskets; and for baking purposes they use the
red-hot stones that are to be found everywhere in this vicinity. These
broad, flat stones are the identical ones on which the natives not long
ago were accustomed to roast their prisoners of war before eating them.

A certain consistency is discovered in the manners and customs of this
people who live so nearly after the style and laws which governed their
ancestors, and which have been carefully preserved for hundreds of
years. Superstition is born in a Maori. He is a professed Christian in
most cases and accepts the Bible, but he is apt to give to it his own
interpretation. These children of Nature follow their ancestral
traditions modified by Christian influences. The original religion of
the natives, if we may call it by that name, consists in a dim belief in
a future state, quite undefined even in their own minds. It was largely
a sort of ancestor worship, according to the missionaries, with a vague
idea of some Being higher than anything human or finite. The sorcery
which was universally practised among them filled up a certain measure
of religious conviction and observance, nor is this by any means disused
among them to-day. Many of the tribes can read and write, and
educational facilities are freely offered to the rising generation by
the English government.

The Maori differs in many essential particulars from most savage races
with whom we are more familiar. He does not, as has been mentioned,
foster a spirit of secret revenge, but when his enmity is aroused, it is
openly displayed. This has been a tribal trait with the Maoris for
centuries. Before declaring war the Maori always gives his enemy fair
notice; still for ages he has been accustomed to go to war upon
imaginary grievances, or, to put it more clearly, his great object was
to make prisoners of war, and when made to cook and eat them. The early
Maoris, and even so late as sixty years ago, looked upon war--what we
call civil war--as being the only legitimate object of life.