attack, and abide thereby. They would supply a starving garrison with
provisions in order that an impending conflict might be a fair trial
of strength. War was to them something more dignified than a mere
lawless struggle. It was a solemn game to be played according to rules
as rigidly laid down and often as honourably adhered to as in
the international cricket and football matches of Englishmen and
Australians.

As is so often the case with fighting races capable of cruelty, they
were strictly courteous in their intercourse with strangers. Indeed,
their code of manners to visitors was so exact and elaborate as to
leave an impression of artificiality. No party of wayfarers would
approach a _pa_ without giving formal notice. When the strangers were
received, they had the best of everything, and the hosts, who saw that
they were abundantly supplied, had too much delicacy to watch them
eat. Maori breeding went so far as to avoid in converse words or
topics likely to be disagreeable to their hearers.

Their feeling for beauty was shown not merely in their art, but in
selecting the sites of dwelling-places, and in a fondness for shady
shrubs and trees about their huts and for the forest-flowers. The
natural images and similes so common in their wild, abrupt, unrhymed
chants and songs showed how closely they watched and sympathised with
nature. The hoar-frost, which vanishes with the sunrise, stood with
them for ephemeral fame. Rank without power was "a fountain without
water." The rushing stream reminded the Maori singer, as it did the
Mantuan, of the remorseless current of life and human fate.

"But who can check life's stream?
Or turn its waters back?
'Tis past,"

cried a father mourning for his dead son. In another lament a grieving
mother is compared to the drooping fronds of the tree-fern. The maiden
keeping tryst bids the light fleecy cloudlets, which in New Zealand so
often scud across the sky before the sea-wind, to be messengers to her
laggard gallant.

"The sun grows dim and hastes away
As a woman from the scene of battle,"

says the lament for a dead chief.[1] The very names given to hills,
lakes, and rivers will be witnesses in future days of the poetic
instinct of the Maori--perhaps the last destined to remain in his
land. Such names are the expressive Wai-orongo-mai (Hear me, ye
waters!); Puke-aruhe (ferny hill); Wai-rarapa (glittering water);
Maunga-tapu (sacred mount); Ao-rere (f