their estates on the best terms they could bargain for. As it
is, they receive yearly very large sums in rent. They could be rich
farmers if they cared to master the science of farming. They have
brains to learn more difficult things. They might be healthy men
and women if they would accept the teachings of sanitary science
as sincerely as they took in the religious teachings of the early
missionaries. If they could be made to realize that foul air,
insufficient dress, putrid food, alternations of feast and famine, and
long bouts of sedulous idleness are destroying them as a people and
need not do so, then their decay might be arrested and the fair hopes
of the missionary pioneers yet be justified. So long as they soak
maize in the streams until it is rotten and eat it together with dried
shark--food the merest whiff of which will make a white man sick;
so long as they will wear a suit of clothes one day and a tattered
blanket the next, and sit smoking crowded in huts, the reek of which
strikes you like a blow in the face; so long as they will cluster
round dead bodies during their _tangis_ or wakes; so long as they
will ignore drainage--just so long will they remain a blighted and
dwindling race, and observers without eyes will talk as though there
was something fateful and mysterious in their decline. One ray of hope
for them has quite lately been noted. They are caring more for the
education of their children. Some three thousand of these now go
to school, not always irregularly. Very quaint scholars are the
dark-eyed, quick-glancing, brown-skinned little people sitting tied
"to that dry drudgery at the desk's dull wood," which, if heredity
counts for anything, must be so much harder to them than to the
children of the _Pakeha_.[1] Three years ago the Government
re-organized the native schools, had the children taught sanitary
lessons with the help of magic lanterns, and gave power to committees
of native villagers to prosecute the parents of truants. The result
has been a prompt, marked and growing improvement in the attendance
and the general interest. Better still, the educated Maori youths are
awakening to the sad plight of their people. Pathetic as their regrets
are, the healthy discontent they show may lead to better things.

[Footnote 1: Foreigner.]

[Illustration]

Chapter III

THE MAORI AND THE UNSEEN

"Dreaming caves
Full of the groping of bewildered waves."

Th