Page:Our New Zealand Cousins.djvu/49

 beguile the time by desperate pulls at black, evil-smelling cutty-pipes. To a tattooed group sitting round the great council-hall an English interpreter is retailing the items of interest from a recentlyarrived newspaper. What a contrast is here? The great whare is carved with all sorts of hideous, grotesque images. Surely, even in the wildest delirium, or the most dire nightmare, we've never seen such outrageous effigies. Surmounting a post used as a flagstaff, is a goggle-eyed monstrosity, with gaping jaws and lolling blood-red tongue; while close by, out nearer the point which forms the burial-place of the tribe, and was formerly a fortified pah, stands a neat little English church, with a pathway of shining white shells; and one's thoughts cannot help reverting to the stories of strife and treachery, and cannibalism, and all the horrors of pagan cruelty, now happily banished for ever before the gentle, loving message of the Cross.

A long-drawn, wailing, dirge-like cry proceeds from one inclosure. Looking in we see a company of women, seated in rows beside a tent, crooning and keening with a strangely weird inflection; and peering further, we are soon able to discover the cause. Beneath the canvas lies a figure draped in white so stiff, so rigid. No motion in those stiff, extended limbs. An old chief, weeping copious tears, sits beside his dead son, patting the poor unconscious corpse, with a curiously pathetic tenderness. The old woman who officiates as chief mourner, waves a fan