any foreign power attack
you with grinding organ and white mice, you may hope for succours from
without; from which cause "castles" in England are more long-lived. In
New Zealand, however, it is different, as, to the present day, the old
system prevails, and castles continue to be disposed of in the natural
way, as has been seen lately at Taranaki.

I now purchased a piece of land and built a "castle" for myself. I
really can't tell to the present day who I purchased the land from, for
there were about fifty different claimants, every one of whom assured
me that the other forty-nine were "humbugs," and had no right whatever.
The nature of the different titles of the different claimants were
various. One man said his ancestors had killed off the first owners;
another declared his ancestors had driven off the second party; another
man, who seemed to be listened to with more respect than ordinary,
declared that his ancestor had been the first possessor of all, and had
never been ousted, and that this ancestor was a huge lizard that lived
in a cave on the land many ages ago: and, sure enough, there was the
cave to prove it.

Besides the principal claims there were an immense number of secondary
ones--a sort of latent equities--which had lain dormant until it was
known the pakeha had his eye on the land. Some of them seemed to me at
the time odd enough. One man required payment because his ancestors, as
he affirmed, had exercised the right of catching rats on it; but which
he (the claimant) had never done, for the best of reasons, _i.e._,
there were no rats to catch: except indeed pakeha rats, which were
plenty enough, but this variety of rodent was not counted as game.
Another claimed because his grandfather had been murdered on the land,
and--as I am a veracious pakeha--another claimed payment because _his_
grandfather had committed the murder! Then half the country claimed
payments of various value, from one fig of tobacco to a musket, on
account of a certain _wahi tapu_, or ancient burying-ground, which was
on the land, and in which every one almost had had relations or rather
ancestors buried, as they could clearly make out, in old times; though
no one had been deposited in it for about two hundred years, and the
bones of the others had been (as they said) removed long ago to a
_torere_ in the mountains.

It seemed an awkward circumstance that there was some difference of
opinion as to where this same _wahi tapu_ wa