lying cloud). Last, but not
least, there is the lordly Ao-rangi (Cloud in the heavens), over which
we have plastered the plain and practical "Mount Cook."

[Footnote 1: The Maori is deeply imbued with the poetry of the woods.
His commonest phraseology shows it. 'The month when the pohutu-kawa
flowers'; 'the season when the kowhai is in bloom'; so he punctuates
time. And the years that are gone he softly names' dead leaves!'--HAY,
_Brighter Britain_.]

Many of the Maori chiefs were, and some even now are, masterly
rhetoricians. The bent of the race was always strongly to controversy
and discussion. Their ignorance of any description of writing made
them cultivate debate. Their complacent indifference to time made
deliberative assembly a prolonged, never-wearying joy. The chiefs
met in council like Homer's heroes--the commons sitting round and
muttering guttural applause or dissent. The speeches abounded in short
sententious utterances, in proverbs, poetic allusions and metaphors
borrowed from legends. The Maori orator dealt in quotations as freely
as the author of the _Anatomy of Melancholy_, and his hearers caught
them with as much relish as that of a House of Commons of Georgian
days enjoying an apt passage from the classics. Draped in kilt and
mantle, with spear or carved staff of office in the right hand, the
speakers were manly and dignified figures. The fire and force of their
rhetoric were not only aided by graceful gesture but were set out in a
language worthy of the eloquent. If we cannot say of the Maori tongue
as Gibbon said of Greek, that it "can give a soul to the objects of
sense and a body to the abstractions of philosophy," we can at any
rate claim for it that it is a musical and vigorous speech. Full of
vowel-sounds, entirely without sibilants, but rich in guttural and
chest notes, it may be made at will to sound liquid or virile, soft or
ringing.

The seamy side of Maori life, as of all savage life, was patent to the
most unimaginative observer. The traveller found it not easy to dwell
on the dignity, poetry and bravery of a race which contemned washing,
and lived, for the most part, in noisome hovels. A chief might be an
orator and skilled captain, but, squatting on the ground, smeared with
oil, daubed with red ochre and grimly tattooed, he probably impressed
the white visitor chiefly as an example of dirt and covetousness. The
traveller might be hospitably entertained in a _pa_ the gate of which
w