path or thoroughfare of the
village. There, under the "lee" of a bush, or tuft of flax, he gazed
silently, and with "lacklustre eye," on the busy doings of the Maori
world, of which he was hardly to be called a member. Twice a day some
food would be thrown on the ground before him, to gnaw as best he
might, without the use of hands; and at night, tightening his greasy
rags around him, he would crawl into some miserable lair of leaves and
rubbish; there, cold, half starved, miserable, and dirty, to pass, in
fitful ghost-haunted slumbers, a wretched night, as prelude to another
wretched day. It requires, they say, all sorts of people to make a
world; and I have often thought, in observing one of these miserable
objects, that his, or hers, was the very lowest ebb to which a human
being's prospects in life could be brought by adverse fate. When I met,
or rather saw, a female practitioner, I fairly ran for it; and,
believing my readers to be equally tender-hearted, I shall not venture
on any more description, but merely say that the male undertaker, such
as I have described him, would be an Apollo, in comparison with one of
these hags.

What will my kind reader say when I tell him that I myself once got
_tapu'd_ with this same horrible, most horrible, style of _tapu_? I
hold it to be a fact that there is not one man in New Zealand but
myself who has a clear understanding of what the word "excommunication"
means: indeed I did not understand what it meant till I got _tapu'd_. I
was returning with about sixty men from a journey along the west coast,
and was a short distance in advance of the party, when I came to where
the side of a hill had fallen down on to the beach and exposed a number
of human bones. There was a large skull rolling about in the water, and
I took up this skull without consideration, carried it to the side of
the hill, scraped a hole, and covered it up. Just as I had finished
burying it up came my friends, and I saw at once, by the astonishment
and dismay depicted on their countenances, that I had committed some
most unfortunate act. They soon let me know that the hill had been a
burial-place of their tribe, and jumped at once to the conclusion that
the skull was the skull of one of their most famous chiefs; whose name
they told me. They informed me also that I was no longer fit company
for human beings, and begged me to fall to the rear and keep my
distance. They told me all this from a very respectful dist