up again for a little while. The master thought of the
trouble they had with Ayacanora in "Westward Ho", and was comforted, and
tackled his romance again. Then the schoolmistress fell sick and things
went wrong. The groceries went down faster than ever, and the house got
very dirty, and began to have a native smell about it. August grew fat,
and lazy, and dirty, and less reliable on washing-days, or when there
was anything special to do in the house. "The savage blood is strong,"
thought the teacher, "and she is beginning to long for her own people
and free unconventional life." One morning--on a washing-day, too, as it
happened--she called out, before the teacher and his wife were up, that
the Maoris who supplied them with milk were away, and she had promised
to go up and milk the cow and bring the milk down. The teacher gave her
permission. One of the scholars usually brought the milk early. Lunch
time came and no August, no milk--strangest of all, only half the school
children. The teacher put on his hat, and went up to the pa once more.
He found August squatted in the midst of a circle of relations. She was
entertaining them with one of a series of idealistic sketches of the
teacher's domestic life, in which she showed a very vivid imagination,
and exhibited an unaccountable savage sort of pessimism. Her intervals
of absence had been occupied in this way from the first. The astounding
slanders she had circulated concerning the teacher's private life came
back, bit by bit, to his ears for a year afterwards, and her character
sketches of previous teachers, and her own relations--for she spared
nobody--would have earned a white woman a long and well-merited term of
imprisonment for criminal libel. She had cunningly, by straightforward
and unscrupulous lying, prejudiced the principal mother and boss woman
of the pa against the teacher and his wife; as a natural result of which
the old lady, who, like the rest, was very ignorant and ungrateful,
"turned nasty" and kept the children from school. The teacher lost
his temper, so the children were rounded up and hurried down to
school immediately; with them came August and her aunt, with alleged
explanations and excuses, and a shell-fish. The aunt and sisters said
they'd have nothing to do with August. They didn't want her and wouldn't
have her. The teacher said that, under those circumstances, she'd better
go and drown herself; so she went home with them.

The whole business